Slaughter (31 page)

“Which is?”

“Pearl.”

As Quinn stood in the suddenly cold silence, he was sure he could hear the distant but persistent thrashing sound of an approaching helicopter.

I
t was dusk, and they heard the helicopter before they saw it. The engine itself wasn't that loud, but the air passing through the thrashing rotor blades as they provided lift and balance soon made conversation impossible unless it was shouted.

Downward-aimed lights illuminated the dimming landing area. The copter dropped to about twenty feet, toward the center of the circle of brilliant light. It rotated until its nose was pointed north and the craft was parallel to the building.

It settled in gradually, and the choppy, thrashing sound, the one from the Gremlin's nightmares, lost volume as the rotors and vertical tail propeller slowed and the engine idled.

The helicopter looked much larger on the ground. It was gray with a red cross and bore the lettering of one of the hospitals in the area, St. Andrew's. The killer had never heard of it. Didn't care.

A plainclothes cop came to the fore of the knot of people, then edged closer to Quinn and whispered, “Renz said to tell you the guy at the controls was a former attack helicopter pilot in Afghanistan. He volunteered for this job.”

That was good to know. Confirmation. At least the Gremlin wouldn't be at the controls when the craft tried to take off.

“That's where they met,” the cop said. “Both those guys can fly a chopper.”

Great,
Quinn thought. He could almost feel the odds shifting, and not in his favor.

With Quinn beside her, Pearl trudged toward the helicopter as if her feet were heavy.

The side door on the helicopter slid open.

Weaver stood leaning against it, the blasts of air from the rotors plastering her hair over her face. She was feigning a weakness she didn't feel. She was actually revved and ready for action. The pilot, a stocky guy with gray hair cut so close he was almost bald, slid over where he was visible and extended his hand to help Weaver climb inside. An encouraging signal that he was ready to get away from their exposed position fast. Another figure, no doubt the Gremlin, was barely visible seated in back

Weaver made a move as if to climb into the chopper, but Quinn squeezed her shoulder and she stopped.

“Wait,” he said to her, “wait . . .”

“I'm no longer useful,” she said, her head turned toward Quinn so the others couldn't read her lips. “He's sweeping up after himself.”

He knew what she meant, and that she was right.

The look on the pilot's face was fear. The figure in back fired a small, silenced handgun.

Wearing an astounded expression, the pilot slumped forward. He scrambled to get out of the helicopter, fell to the ground, and died staring up at the slowly rotating blades.

While that occupied everyone's mind, the small nimble figure in the helicopter moved quickly to the front of the craft. He leaned forward, aiming the gun at Weaver. The helicopter's speaker system was on. “No one else has to die,” the Gremlin said. “Quinn, give me Pearl and I spare the police lady. Disobey, and we'll see if she can come alive yet again.”

Pearl had moved to the side of Quinn and now she edged forward and was standing beside him.

The Gremlin said, “Come forward, police lady.”

Weaver, trembling, took a step toward him. He was seated in the helicopter, leaning slightly forward. Quinn knew the snipers had no clear shot at that angle. The Gremlin also would know it.

“Police lady,” the killer said, “step forward.”

He grinned as she obeyed. “I no longer need you,” he said with a twist of false regret.

That was when Quinn understood that the Gremlin had known from the beginning that he, Quinn, would make his double switch, sending Weaver to play herself, Weaver, playing Pearl. There had never been a dead woman whose heart had resumed beating.

As the Gremlin took aim at her, Weaver bolted. He shot her in the shoulder, and she fell.

Pearl had stepped around Quinn and was moving toward the helicopter.

“Pearl!” Quinn shouted behind her.

“Keep walking or I'll shoot him, darling.” The Gremlin wore his grin like a mask.

Pearl kept walking toward him. When she was close enough, he leaned slightly farther to grab her and pull her the rest of the way inside the helicopter, still with the gun aimed at Quinn.

Quinn stood staring.

Pearl accepted the Gremlin's hand up. As she raised herself into the helicopter, she squared her body toward the Gremlin.

Quinn hadn't moved, except for extending his right arm slightly toward Pearl and . . . what? Pressing a key or button on his iPhone? Signaling?

In those last seconds, the Gremlin sensed that something was very wrong. His face twisted meanly. His eyes implored. “Quinn, you don't know—”

The blast was loud and sounded more than anything like a shotgun being fired. Its source was like something that used to be called a belly gun.

It was a shaped charge. The Gremlin would have appreciated that.

It wasn't just Weaver who'd been wearing a bulletproof vest. Quinn had been sure that Helen the profiler was right when she said it was Pearl the killer wanted most of all. Given a choice, he would choose Pearl, who was the most important thing in the world to Quinn. Weaver had been wearing her unaltered vest. Let the killer think he was the one who'd decided on Pearl. Her vest had been altered in the front, and contained a small iron plate on which was a shaped charge aimed like a shotgun and full of nails and ball bearings. The explosive had been fitted to Pearl's midsection, outside the vest, and aimed straight forward. Her baggy hospital gown had covered the vest. Pearl had been instructed to aim her navel at the Gremlin.

It had worked.

Pearl had trusted Quinn and he'd come through. Weaver had suffered only a slight shoulder injury. She would live. Pearl, who had been target and become weapon, would live.

Pearl was sitting stunned and bent forward, and still had a stomachache, but the vest had diffused most of the pain of the charge's powerful kick. Her sore muscles would soon heal.

The Gremlin had taken the full force of the blast. It had been concentrated on him as planned. A shaped charge, directing its blast forward. The shrapnel of nails and ball bearings had blown him almost in half. He still looked astounded at having been killed by a woman.

Defeated by a gadget.

Pearl thought maybe they would bury the Gremlin with that same astounded expression on his face. She hoped so.

She hoped they would bury him deep.

T
wo weeks later, a man in a wrinkled gray suit and no neck came into Q&A, stood just inside the door, and glanced around. He was average height but broad, and had about him the look of a bill collector who loved his work. He walked directly to where Quinn was seated behind his desk. Fedderman stood up across the room, wondering.

But the broad man smiled and offered his hand to Quinn. “Frank Quinn.” He said it as if he were telling Quinn and not asking him. “I'm Henry Safire.”

“What can I do—”

“Listen,” Henry Safire said. “That's all I want. Just . . . listen.”

Quinn settled back in his chair. “You'd better not tell me I need insurance.”

“There's something we thought you should know.”

“You're off to a bad start. Who are ‘we'?”

Safire drew a badge from his pocket and flashed it at Quinn. “I'm Homeland Security.”

Quinn leaned forward and studied the ID and badge. He sat back. Said, “I'm listening.”

“You might have some of this info,” Safire said, ”but I'm here to keep you up to date. We'll start with Ethan Ellis, the architect-engineer who died in that car accident. He committed suicide.”

“Yes, I know that.”

“You know about the envelope with your name on it tucked into his car's seat cushion,” Safire said. “We read it and don't want anyone else to ever know about it. Ethan was into some pretty bad behavior. Compulsive. Illegal. Harmful. There is proof of that, but no point in letting the tiger out of the bag. Ethan Ellis was being extorted. Compromised. He had to obey orders, or some things harmful to him would have been given to the media and sensationalized. You were part of what Ethan planned in order to spare his family and reputation.” Safire made a tent of his fingers. Looked at his nails, which were chewed almost to nonexistence.

“To be brief,” Safire said, “someone owned and instructed Ethan Ellis. For several years Ethan studied the architecture and engineering of certain Manhattan buildings. He wanted to make sure that what was planned was possible. He chose buildings that could be brought down by explosives in such a way, and direction, that they would knock down adjacent buildings. So buildings could be destroyed in sequence, in strings of four or five, or more, like dominoes only messier.”

“The Gremlin,” Quinn said. “He was the architect's master. The Gremlin wanted those buildings destroyed, revealing what was inside. Everything exposed to his curiosity and compulsion. He could have been made to destroy some of the same buildings he'd designed.”

Henry Safire seemed not to have heard. “Someone like Ethan Ellis could be made to determine exactly how the structures would fall, in strings of up to a dozen or more. Since he'd designed many of the buildings, he could also plant the explosives. Small, powerful charges, expertly applied, that could be detonated from a short distance. All that was needed was a driver to take a certain route at a certain speed through the city, sending out intermittent signals via a cell phone.”

“What would keep this driver from being killed as half of Manhattan fell?” Quinn asked. As he spoke, he tried to imagine the island of Manhattan a jumble of wreckage north to south. Then he tried not to imagine it.

“The signals would activate timers on the bombs so they would detonate in precise sequences,” Safire said. “This wouldn't happen until well after the driver, who activated the timers while keeping a constant speed, was far away.”

Quinn pushed for more answers. “Why not simply use Ethan Ellis for the driver?”

“Let's face it, Quinn, some folks are squeamish about killing thousands, maybe millions, of people.” Henry Safire shrugged. “Like you, Quinn.”

Quinn said, “Thank God!”

“Besides,” Safire said, “they had to have something profound on the driver. Something they could hold over his head that would scare the hell out of him. Something dearer to him than life itself. Even his own life.”

“Then the car crash
was
suicide?”

“No doubt about it,” Safire said. “We'll keep the motive under wraps as long as we can, but you know how it is with secrets.”

“Secrets?” Quinn said. “There are none.”

D
emolition experts, using information contained in Ethan Ellis's suicide note to Quinn, located and disarmed most of the planted bombs set to tick away to detonation when a certain code was broadcasted to them at a certain frequency. The chances of eventually finding and combining the code and frequency were practically nil.

It shouldn't matter that a number of the bombs remained unfound, hidden away or concealed in cast concrete. Within a few years the explosive would become inert and a danger to no one.

In what used to be a car dealer's service center in Astoria, New York, the devoted son of Ethan Ellis worked assiduously, using mail-order parts and plans to rebuild a small, wrecked helicopter a Midwest TV station had given up on for weather and traffic reports. A home project, he called it, if anyone asked. When finished, it wouldn't lift or carry a lot of weight. Nor would it fly very fast, with a pilot and passenger limit of two people. But it could fly low enough to pass under radar, yet high enough so that its broadcast signals would reach receivers and detonators, even in buildings with higher floors.

That was enough. Even more than enough. For its final flight, the helicopter was only required to carry one passenger at a certain speed, along with a modem sending out a certain signal in a certain code.

Straight down Broadway.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A multiple Edgar and Shamus Award winner—including the Shamus Lifetime Achievement Award—John Lutz is the author of over 30 novels. His novel
SWF Seeks Same
was made into the hit movie
Single White Female
(1992), starring Bridget Fonda, and later remade as
The Roommate
(2011), starring Minka Kelly and Leighton Meester, and
The Ex
was a critically acclaimed HBO feature. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri, and Sarasota, Florida. In describing his serial-killer thrillers, John Lutz says: “I'm trying to provide readers with the kind of roller-coaster ride that will scare them a lot but compel them to buy another ticket.”

 

His website is johnlutzonline.com.