Darker Than Night (5 page)

This time Harley Renz knocked politely on Quinn's apartment door.

Quinn peered through the round peephole and viewed the distorted police captain. Renz shifted his weight impatiently and raised his elongated arm to look at his watch. Busy man in a hurry, taking valuable time off to talk to a lowlife like Quinn.

Quinn waited awhile, until Renz knocked again, louder, before opening the door.

“Quinn,” Renz said simply, nodding hello. “I would've called up on the intercom, but I saw there was sixty years of enamel over the button.” He studied Quinn, who was in his stocking feet but was wearing new gray slacks and a white T-shirt, and didn't look quite so like a thug as he had during Renz's last visit. “You got a haircut.”

“Got a lot of them cut,” Quinn said. “You wouldn't have noticed just one.”

Renz smiled. “Some new threads, too. I'm glad you put the money I sent to good use. May I enter your shit can abode?”

“Sure. You're a fit with the decor.” Quinn stepped back and to the side, closing the door behind Renz after he'd entered.

Renz sat down on the sofa and crossed his legs, then looked around. “I don't know or care if that's an insult. You've cleaned up the place. No magazines, newspapers, or orange peels on the floor. And is that new mold in the corner?”

“Mold's the same. Orange peels clashed with the carpet, so they had to go. You clash, too.”

“Remember I'm your friend now, Quinn. Your way up and back in.” Renz made a big deal of sniffing, wrinkling his nose, and squinting. “It doesn't smell as bad in here. Is that insecticide? Or are you burning incense?”

“Have you come to pay me more money?”

“Do you need more?”

“Not yet,” Quinn said honestly.

“Come up with anything in the Elzner apartment or murder file?”

“Not much,” Quinn said. “The groceries bother me. The strawberry jelly.”

“Jelly?”

“Jam, actually. A fairly expensive gourmet brand. There were two jars in with the groceries in the plastic bags and on the kitchen table. And there was a nearly full jar of the same stuff in the refrigerator.”

Renz uncrossed his legs and crossed his arms, thinking about that. “Somebody else bought the groceries. Somebody who didn't know the Elzners had plenty of jelly.”

“Jam.”

“Still odd, though. Two jars…”

“Maybe they were a gift from somebody who knew how much one or both of the Elzners liked that kind of jam.”

“A gift.” Renz made a steeple of his fingers. He liked the idea of a gift, except for…“But why would somebody buy the Elzners a gift and then kill them?”

“Maybe he hadn't planned on killing them.”

“Maybe.” Renz grinned. “And he just happened to be carrying a gun equipped with a silencer. The important thing is, if you're right, it points to a third party for sure. A killer still on the loose.”

“A third party who might've left before the Elzners were killed.”

Renz sneered at Quinn. “Don't send me up, then bring me down. You're coming around to my way of thinking about this case; you know you are.”

“I've moved in that direction,” Quinn admitted. He didn't want Renz to think he'd moved almost all the way. “Also, it might be coincidental that the plastic grocery bags aren't the kind that have the name of the store on them. Or it could be the killer deliberately bought groceries someplace where they couldn't be traced by the bags and someone might remember him.”

“Very good, Quinn. I was sure you'd have a different slant on this and come up with something new. You didn't disappoint me.”

“I'm flushed with pride. Are you here to tell
me
anything new?”

“Yeah. I'm afraid things have changed. Egan found out you're on the case. I think from a uniform named Charlie Mercer.”

“Big, square-shouldered guy, blue and brown?”

“Fits him.”

“He was coming out of the elevator in the Elzners' building when I stepped in.”

“He get a good look at you?”

“Like I got at him.”

“Then there's no mistaking it; the bastard must've told Egan.” Renz's brow furrowed. “Mercer's made a mistake. One he'll pay dearly for, and sooner than he thinks. Egan's probably already notified the chief's office. Maybe somebody in the news media. That last won't help him.”

“Why not?”

Renz's forehead relaxed, but the furrows didn't fade away. “Because I've gone on the offensive. I've notified all my media contacts I've taken a chance on a good man—that'd be you. The safety of the community comes before NYPD politics and petty revenge, so I've asked Frank Quinn to look into the Elzner case because he's the best. If the story's not already on the news, it will be soon, before Egan's. The department won't move to take you off the case, because it'd be bad PR. There was never a criminal charge and a trial in the rape case. The public'll see you as a hero, Quinn. A victim of unsubstantiated rumor who deserves a second chance. I've also assigned a team of detectives to work under your command.”

Quinn was surprised. “Team?”

“Two detectives, but you'll have additional temporary help, if and when you need it.” Renz leaned forward on the sofa. “You know how it works, Quinn. The killing of a typical Manhattan couple means media by the shit load. Media means pressure. Can you deal with it?”

“I can deal. This team…are these good cops you're giving me?”

“Sure, they are. Your old partner from your radio car years, Larry Fedderman, and his new partner, Pearl Kasner.”

Fedderman. Quinn almost smiled. Other than the people who'd set him up, Fedderman was probably the only one in the NYPD who didn't think Quinn was guilty of raping a minor. Fedderman had paid for it, in wisecracks and dirty looks and shitty assignments. The word was, he still believed in Quinn. “Fedderman'll do. What about Kasner?”

Renz shifted on the sofa cushion as if he'd just noticed he was sitting on something sharp. “She's got kind of a reputation in the department, but she's also got great skills.”

Uh-oh.
“Reputation?”

“She's got what you might call a temper. Not so unlike yourself. She gets in the same kinda trouble you used to.”

“She in any of it now?”

“Yes and no.”

“What's the yes part?”

“Vince Egan made a play for her in a hotel lobby, and she knocked him on his ass.”

Quinn stared incredulously. “A working cop swung on an NYPD captain? She's on her way out, then.”

“Let's just say she's on the bubble.” Renz explained to Quinn that Egan was drunk at the time and there were witnesses. It was the kind of trouble the NYPD didn't need aired in public. An IA investigation had been spiked before it could get under way. “It's the kinda process you should understand,” Renz said.

“Egan'll get her some other way.”

“Not if you, Pearl, and Fedderman break the Elzner murder case.”

Quinn understood Renz's angle better now. He jammed his hands in his pants pockets and paced in his stocking feet. “I don't like this. Too many last chances. How about Fedderman? He got something big riding on this, too? Will solving this case somehow cure him of a fatal disease?”

“You're the one who might be cured of a fatal disease, Quinn. Loneliness and rot.”

That one got through. Quinn stopped pacing and turned to face Renz.

“You oughta know last chances aren't so bad,” Renz said. “In fact, they're what life's all about.”

Quinn felt the anger drain from him. Renz was right.

“You can meet with Fedderman and Kasner tomorrow morning,” Renz said. “You name the time and place. I didn't figure you'd want the meet here, since the apartment's not set up for entertaining, even without the orange peels.”

“Tomorrow's supposed to be a nice day,” Quinn said. “We can meet just inside the Eighty-sixth Street entrance to Central Park, say around ten o'clock.”

“That'll work. They'll be in plain clothes.”

“I'll watch for Fedderman. What's Kasner look like?”

“You should know Fedderman's put on some weight, mostly around the middle. Kasner's short, a looker with brown eyes, a lotta dark hair, and a good rack.”

“And a good punch, apparently.”

“A short right,” Renz said, grinning as he stood up from the couch. “I got the story from a bartender I know at the Meermont. She knocked Egan ass over elbows. You and Pearl, you oughta get along fine.”

“Like salt and pepper,” Quinn said, liking Kasner a little already, even though he knew she might be playing a double game, reporting to Renz as well as to him.

“More like pepper and pepper,” Renz said, going out the door.

Quinn listened to Renz's receding footsteps on the creaking wooden stairs, then the faint swishing sound of the street door opening and closing.

He wasn't sure what he was getting himself into, but at least his life was moving forward again.

Or some direction.

 

Pain!

It would never stop. Or so it seemed.

The woman continued crawling toward the door, and the whip continued to lash her bare buttocks, her meaty thighs, and sometimes, to surprise her, her bare back.

She'd known what she was getting into—so this was her own doing, as her father used to say. She was to blame. She bore the guilt like invisible chains. When she'd received the pain and punishment she deserved, she'd be the better for it. The chains would drop away and she'd be pure again.

She was off the carpet now and crawling faster toward the door, knowing she wasn't going to escape, that she had no chance, as always.
A woman with an M.B.A. and a responsible job…what am I doing here?
She clenched her teeth and whimpered. She wouldn't scream. That was one of the rules. She'd been commanded not to scream. And if she did, if her neighbors heard and called the police, how would she explain? Her bare knees thumped on the hardwood floor, and her hands made desperate slapping sounds louder than her moans.

The whip whistled near her ear, sending a line of fire across her upper back and curling around her shoulder. It burned again across her tender inner right thigh. He knew how to use a whip, this one.

Ten feet from the door.

The whip set fire to her right buttock. There was less time between lashes now. She crawled even faster, hurting her knees and the heels of her hands. The whip followed, flicking her like a dragon's fiery and agile tongue.

The man standing over her was the dragon.

Afterward, maybe she'd lie with him, cuddled in his arms, and he'd pretend to love her. It wouldn't be real, like what he was doing to her now wasn't exactly real, but that didn't matter. She had no right to expect real.

As she stretched out an arm and her fingertips brushed the door, he clutched her ankles and dragged her back and away from freedom.

It began again.

What am I doing here?

Bent Oak, Missouri, 1987.

Two days before Luther Lunt's fourteenth birthday, state employees in Jefferson City dropped a cyanide pellet in the gas chamber, killing Luther's father.

Luther's mother had already been dead for more than a year. She'd died on the same day and in the same way as his sister, Verna, beneath the thunder and buckshot hail of his dad's Remington twelve-gauge. Luther had hunted with the gun twice and knew what it could do to a rabbit. What it had done to his mom and Verna was lots worse.

Seeing it, hearing it, smelling it, even listening to the slowing trickle of blood from his mom's ruined throat, was the kind of thing that stayed in the mind.

Luther cried almost nonstop for days and nights, wondering why Verna had to go tell their mom what she and Dad had been up to. He shouldn't blame her, Luther knew, as she was only twelve, and it was his father, after all, who'd squeezed off the shots from the old double-barrel.

But the fact was, Luther
did
blame Verna, as well as his mother. They all knew anyway, and it was Verna and his mom who brought it all into the open, who uttered the words that made it real so something had to be done about it. Everything had been going along fine until then. Going along, at least.

And since his father had taken it on himself to start going into Verna's room, he'd stopped coming into Luther's.

Verna's fault.

Verna and his mom's.

Then his father'd been taken from Luther to rot away in a cell in Jeff City, waiting to die when his appeals ran out.

Leaving Luther alone.

“He's suffered something terrible,” Luther's great-aunt Marjean from Saint Louis had said of him after the murders, “but I'm eighty-seven years of age and get by hardscrabble on my Social Security. No way I can help the poor thing.”

So Luther had gone into the foster-care system, and was taken in by the Black family, Dara and her husband, Norbert. The Blacks had temporary custody of three children besides Luther, who was the oldest. Dara Black, a stout woman with an apple-round face who almost always wore the same stained apron, watched over the children in the old farmhouse, while Norbert was away painting barns and houses in the surrounding countryside.

Luther used to watch her bustle around the house, smiling too much and even sometimes whistling while she got her work done. Luther was aware that she knew and didn't know that Norbert was molesting the children. Nobody ever talked about the subject. Luther thought that was best.

The state paid the Blacks a stipend for their foster care, and Norbert's painting brought in some more money. And it was true Luther would someday have to learn a trade, which was the excuse Norbert came up with to take Luther in as an unpaid apprentice, meaning Luther would do a lot of the heavy work, lugging five-gallon paint buckets, moving ladders and scaffolding, scraping weathered paint off hardwood with Norbert's good-for-shit tools. What Luther learned mostly was how to work all day in the boiling sun.

The day after his father was executed, he ran away.

And eleven months and three days later he was found sleeping behind a Dumpster in Kansas City and returned to the Black farm.

Life as Luther knew it, with its hardships and terrible, intricate balances, began again.