Urge to Kill (29 page)

“Yeah.” He guessed he was. He looked around and saw what Pearl had seen. “I disturbed him. He was looking for something, on a fact-finding mission.”

“Who we talking about?” Pearl asked. But they both knew.

“Tigers do that,” Quinn said.

“Leave drawers open?”

“No. They double back on whoever’s stalking them; then they lie in wait and become their most dangerous.”

“I didn’t know you hunted tigers.”

“I watch the nature channel.”

“Do we really think the intruder was the killer, trying to learn what we know so he can stay ahead of us?”

“It’s a possibility. Let’s look around and see if he was successful.”

Pearl moved closer and put both arms around Quinn, steadying him. Of course that was when Fedderman arrived.

He stood inside the door with a surprised look on his face that needed to be wiped off with a napkin. “I’m interrupting….”

“Don’t be an asshole,” Pearl said. “We were practicing judo.”

Quinn moved away from Pearl and explained to Fedderman what had happened. Then the three of them, still silently absorbing the break-in and assault, examined drawer and file cabinet contents and decided nothing was missing.

“He might not have wanted to steal anything,” Fedderman said, “just read things. Just learn.”

“And we can’t know how much he did learn,” Quinn said.

Pearl went over and perched with her haunches on the edge of her desk. “Damn near everything’s in the papers or TV news anyway.”

“And now he knows that,” Fedderman said.

“If he had time to examine everything.”

Pearl pushed herself away from her desk and went around to her computer. She booted up hers, then the other two computers, and clicked on their histories. None of them showed any activity after yesterday afternoon.

“I don’t think he learned much, if anything,” she said. She sat back again on the edge of her desk and crossed her arms. “Maybe we’re making this too complicated, Quinn. Maybe he just wanted to bash you in the head.”

“And knew I’d be coming in at two in the morning?”

“So you interrupted a burglar, and he bashed you in the head,” Fedderman said.

“Possibly. But he did a lot of snooping around and apparently didn’t steal anything.”

“Could he have gotten away after initially knocking you down?” Pearl asked. “I mean, did he have to also hit you in the head?”

“I’m not sure. It’s still hazy.”

“So maybe he was snooping, like we figure. A tiger.”

“Huh?” Fedderman said.

Pearl gave him a dismissive wave of her hand to shut him up. To Quinn, she said: “And he was glad for the opportunity to bash you in the head.”

“Can you think of anyone who’d wanna do that?” Fedderman asked. “Other than me and Pearl.”

“And the killer,” Pearl added.

“One person,” Quinn said, “and I know where to find him.”

The bottle or the gun?

Lavern Neeson, badly bruised from last night’s beating by Hobbs, had risen at three in the morning in pain and this time had chosen both.

It was eight o’clock now, getting warmer and brighter outside. The bedroom was dim, though, because the shades were drawn and the heavy drapes pulled closed, so no one could have seen last night what Hobbs had done to her. It was an overly furnished, somewhat worn and chintzy room of the sort that held its secrets. On one of the walls was a discount store print of a flock of birds—crows, probably—rising as if startled from a wooded landscape. Lavern had never liked it, but never considered changing it.

She sat in a small chair near the bed, listening to Hobbs snore, holding the shotgun from the closet on her lap and casually aimed at him. He wasn’t scheduled for work today and would sleep until well past ten. But Lavern liked to toy with the notion that he might wake up, and the first thing he’d see would be her and the dark muzzle of the shotgun. He wouldn’t know it wasn’t loaded, but maybe he’d die on his own, of a heart attack.

More likely she’d simply scare the hell out of him, and then he’d beat the crap out of her for frightening and embarrassing him.

Still, just thinking about it afforded her some amusement.

In a little while, she’d get up from her chair, leave the bedroom, and return the shotgun to the back of the hall closet. Another day with Hobbs would begin. Fear would begin.

The faint noises of the city winding up for another busy day wafted in to Lavern, and she thought about all the women out there who weren’t in any way dependent on husbands or lovers like Hobbs, women leading happy, pain-free lives, not afraid of making a wrong move that would lead to severe punishment.

Lavern envied those women, but joining their number seemed almost impossible.

She could think of only one way out of her predicament, and it terrified her.

If she left Hobbs, he’d surely come after her. It had happened once before, three years ago. If she tried to change him, he would beat her. If she changed herself, he would beat her. She knew that her friend Bess, who kept urging her to go to a women’s shelter, was right. Not about the shelter—she couldn’t stay there forever, even if Hobbs didn’t simply come and get her. And restraining orders—she’d read the papers, seen the news, and knew how ineffective they were. What Bess
was
right about was that eventually it was almost certain that Hobbs would kill her.

Unless she killed him first.

Lavern thought she might possibly be acquitted if she did that. Other women had killed their abusive husbands and gotten away with it. But so many others hadn’t. And even if she succeeded in avoiding prison, there would be the horrible publicity, the arrest, the trial. Who knew how a jury might find?

Killing Hobbs wasn’t something Lavern actually saw as an option, at least right now. But it was something she could consider, which she did more and more often. It wasn’t illegal to think about it.

She moved the shotgun’s long barrel slightly, so it was aimed at her husband’s head, then traced an invisible line down along his body to his heart, then to his crotch.

Should I shoot him there?

The idea was intriguing. Just sitting there with Hobbs’s life in her hands, without him knowing about it, intrigued her. At the same time, it scared her enough that she no longer could do it without first going to the bottle. If he ever woke up and caught her like this, or found out in some other way what she was doing, he’d be furious. Maybe murderous. He might actually kill her.

Unless she killed him first.

He was alone in the long, maroon-carpeted corridor as he waited for an elevator. Standing easily but alertly, he kept his head moving, glancing up and down the hall. Far down the hall and in the opposite direction from his own room a maid was parking her linen-laden cart near a door. That was all the activity he saw until the elevator arrived.

It was unoccupied but for an attractive blond woman in her forties who had the look and rolling luggage of an airline attendant. He saw by the illuminated button on the elevator’s control panel that, like him, she was going to the lobby. She glanced at Dunn, smiled and looked up at the LED floor numbers as the elevator descended. Dunn moved back and stood where he could also observe elevator etiquette and gaze at the numerals above the door, but at the same time see the woman in his peripheral vision.

He was 99 percent certain she posed no danger, but he’d been conditioned to assume that everyone posed some danger. That was the kind of perspective that would keep him alive.

Dunn wasn’t nearly as nervous as last time, when he’d left his hotel on the first morning. He’d even enjoyed a room-service breakfast of waffles and bacon, with plenty of maple syrup. He’d downed two cups of strong black coffee to make him even more alert and aware.

When the elevator reached lobby level, the woman favored Dunn with another smile as she maneuvered her wheeled suitcase and garment bag out into the lobby. In another time and place he would have smiled back and assisted her with her luggage.

Concentrate! Be in this time, in this place.

He watched the woman begin to walk away and then exited the elevator himself.

The compact Quest and Quarry revolver was a reassuring weight in Dunn’s blazer pocket as he pushed through the hotel’s revolving glass doors and breathed in the warm morning air. He’d studied the company dossier on his quarry and decided on a more aggressive strategy this time. Walking to the next block, so he wouldn’t be remembered by the uniformed doorman, he hailed a cab on his own and gave the driver an intersection near Thomas Rhodes’s address. Then he settled back into the cab’s upholstery and rode alert and mission-bent through the golden morning.

The game was on, his blood was up, and it occurred to him how much he enjoyed this.

Mitzi was still half asleep when she heard the knocking on her door. She reached over and felt a wide expanse of cool linen, and remembered that Mr. Handsome had left sometime after midnight.

More knocking. Not her imagination.

She made herself scoot over on the mattress and then maneuvered her body so she was sitting. The effort caused her head to ache behind both eyes.

Need more sleep. Definitely.

She groaned, explored with her tongue, and found that her teeth were fuzzy. Ah, well…

After drawing a deep breath, she stood up and lurched toward the living room.

When she opened the door to the hall, a man in a gray delivery uniform was standing there holding a long white box. His gaze took a ride up and down her body, and she realized she was wearing only her thin nightgown.

He smiled. “Flowers for a Mitzi Lewis.”

“I am a Mitzi Lewis,” Mitzi said in a sleep-thickened voice. She accepted the almost-weightless box and set it on a table near the door. Then she raised a forefinger in a signal for the man to wait.

It took her a few minutes to find her purse and wallet, then scare up a couple of dollars for a tip. When she turned around she saw that the deliveryman had minded his manners and was still standing politely on the other side of the threshold.

Mitzi handed him the tip, and he smiled again, making an obvious effort this time not to look at her below neck level. He tapped the bill of a nonexistent cap and turned around and began descending the stairs of her sixth-floor walk-up. It was an easier trek down than up, and Mitzi could hear him pick up speed, his shoes rapping out a machine-gun rhythm on the wooden steps.

She closed her apartment door, then carried the long white box over to the sofa and sat down.

When she opened the box she found a dozen long-stemmed red roses. There was a small, plain white envelope containing a white card with a brief message printed in blue ink:

Last night was more than wonderful.
I’ll call.

There was no signature.

Mitzi placed the box next to her on the sofa, then sat slumped forward with her elbows on her knees, her chin resting in her right palm.
No signature…

Christ! I slept with a man and don’t even know his name.

Oh, well, it was an interesting first.

Marty had no idea what had awakened him.

He didn’t think he’d been dreaming. But suddenly there he was in his bed, sprawled on his back, his eyes wide open and staring into darkness. It was hot in the room, and he was sweating, the sheet thrown off him and half jumbled on the floor. The luminous green hands of the big alarm clock on his dresser said that it was a little past three o’clock. He could hear katydids screaming away desperately outside.

He stood up, the floorboard creaking beneath his bare feet, and through his bedroom window he saw a yellow glow seeping through the cracks in the barn and spilling out around the uneven edges of its closed doors.

Lantern light. Somebody’s out there.

Off in the distance a dog barked. Maybe that was what had awakened him. Marty couldn’t be sure. What he did know was that something was happening in the barn.

Wearing only his jockey shorts, he crept from his bedroom so he wouldn’t wake his parents. Either one or both wouldn’t take kindly to him nosing around the house at this hour. Between the two of them, he guessed it was his father out in the barn.

He saw that their bedroom door, usually closed at night, was open. From where he stood he had a view of the corner of their bed, and when he moved so he had a better angle, he saw that it was empty.

Something involving both of them must be going on.

His heart was beating fast as he made his way across the creaking plank floor to the porch door.

Here was something else not right. The door was unlocked.

He went outside onto the porch. There was a half moon tonight, sketched on by dark clouds. It gave enough light to cast a glow on the bare yard and rutted driveway, and to edge the ragged line of trees on the ridge beyond the barn. The katydids were louder, and it was hotter outside than in the house.

Marty stepped down off the porch and began walking toward the big barn with its vertical cracks of faint yellow light. He couldn’t hear his footfalls, and the dog was no longer barking in the distance. The only sound was the hopeless riot of the insects. Their ratcheting rasping was a mating call, Marty knew. Most of them would mate, and within a few days would be dead.

The barn’s big wooden doors were closed but for an inch, and the long rusty hasp stuck out like a handle, inviting Marty to open one of the doors and find out about the mysterious light.

Marty gripped the hasp’s rough surface and pulled the barn door open about two feet. It didn’t squeal like it usually did, and he wondered if someone had oiled the hinges.

He held his breath as he entered the barn.

Marty’s father hadn’t heard him and stood continuing his work on Marty’s mother, who was strung upside down so her nude body dangled from one of the barn’s main rafters. On one of the other rafters perched a small barn owl. Without moving anything else, it swiveled its feathered head and stared at Marty as if he was intruding.