Slaughter - Lutz John. Страница 5

Pearl said, “It’s almost as if she was a doll and he took her apart to see how she worked.”

Quinn thought it was exactly like that. “Jigsaw,” he said. “Do you really suppose that’s how he killed them?”

“That’s how I’d do it.” Nift winked at Pearl. “If I wanted these same results. Of course, I’m a professional. I’d do a cleaner, neater job.” He waved a hand to take in the death scene. “This guy was a butcher, but not one without promise.”

“As a surgeon,” Pearl said.

Nift smiled at her. “No, as a serial killer.”

Renz looked at his watch. “I’ve got important meetings this morning.”

And we don’t. Pearl considered Renz and Nift. Control.

“I’ll drop by and sign the work-for-hire contract, and pick up some NYPD shields,” Quinn said. “Then we’ll go look over the victim’s apartment.”

“Crime scene techs have already been there. No sign of the killer having visited. Nothing unusual. Place neat enough, if you don’t count a D-cup bra draped over a chair in the bedroom.”

“I’m gonna give you Helen for this one,” Renz said. Helen Iman was an NYPD profiler, a six-foot-plus amazon in her forties who looked like a women’s basketball coach. She was the only profiler Quinn had much faith in. She talked some of the familiar and obvious profiler-standard yammer, but there was no arguing with her results.

“Does Helen know that?” Quinn asked.

“She does,” Renz said. “She’ll be by for you to brief her later this morning. Remember, she reports to you and works for me.” Renz smiled. “She has a tightrope to walk. Not so unlike yourself.”

“Who discovered the body?” Quinn asked.

“Early morning jogger. Health nut like the victim. Name of Rose Darling.” Renz glanced again at his gold watch. “I’ll fax you what we got when it comes in. Keep the info tight, though. The sooner the media find out, and the more they know, the harder it will be to find this psycho and put him down.”

“There’s only so much we can do with media,” Quinn said. “We can’t keep this a secret, unless we pay off Rose Darling and send her away on vacation someplace nobody ever heard of.”

“It’s the mob that does that kind of thing,” Renz said.

Pearl concealed a thin smile. Control.

“Let Rose Darling talk,” Renz said. “I run an open shop and play square with the citizens. We just won’t mention anything in detail about the manner of death, especially about the dismemberment. And we’ve got a couple of days before we have to officially ID the body.”

“A few facts and an inconclusive story will drive the media wolves crazy. They’ll have their fangs out and will be pressing for answers.”

“Not to worry,” Renz said. “I’ve got a guy who can handle them.”

“Who would that be?” Quinn asked.

“You.”

5

Jordan Kray sat in his apartment watching the news on his small flat-screen TV. Although he could easily afford a bigger set, he liked to watch the news small, so he could wrap his mind around it. Understand it. Learn how things work.

He sat in his stocking feet with his knees drawn up sideways. His living room was spacious, with a view of the tree-lined street where he’d moved a year ago, when a well-thought-out financial strategy had brought him a windfall. Moving the money from his victims’ accounts to his own had been painful for them but a pleasure for him. He relived their agonies each time he turned the key in his front door.

There were two kinds of people in the world. He was a winner, and the other kind didn’t matter. Once they were dead and disinterested, what was theirs became his. Cash, jewelry, valuable antiques . . . it all became negotiable and found its way into his portfolio of ETFs and mutual funds. The devil’s own treasure chest for one of his disciples.

He’d stopped off at the kitchenware department of a store on Broadway and bought two identical automatic pop-up toasters—one to use in his kitchen, and one to disassemble so he thoroughly understood how the toasters worked. Did they raise the toasted slices of bread when they had become sufficiently toasted, or was the whole thing all about times? Like it took a certain amount of time to toast bread and that was that. Simple. No thermostat, nothing that Jordan couldn’t understand.

But what about the timer? If there was one.

He glanced at the TV screen. People in Arab clothing were throwing rocks at each other, while those not involved in some kind of demonstration cowered and tried to stay safe. This was news?

He shifted his attention to the toaster and used a screwdriver to remove its chrome cover.

There were the heat baffles that were within fractions of an inch of the bread slices. They would probably glow red and stay that way until the bread was sufficiently browned.

But how does the toaster know?

On the TV screen, a battered pickup truck arrived on the scene. Men with what looked like Kalashnikov automatic rifles began jumping out of both sides of the truck’s bed as it coasted down the street toward the rock throwers.

The killer glanced at the TV, then returned his attention to the toaster. It appeared that what he thought of as heat baffles were actually spring-loaded devices whose purpose was to isolate the toast so it was kept from touching the heating coils.

Not wanting to be fooled twice, the killer left the chrome body of the toaster off, and slipped the power cord into a wall socket. He put no bread in, but depressed the toaster’s handle.

It took less than a minute for the coils to glow bright red.

The sound of gunfire erupted from the TV, and a woman’s breathless voice began talking about “the army and the terrorists.”

There were several explosions. The pickup truck that had recently arrived at the scene was now upside down and burning. People were bent over and running, crossing the Arab street to escape gunfire.

The killer unplugged the toaster and let it cool. He had it now. He understood how it worked. How this brand of toaster worked, anyway. It was controlled by a timer rather than by a thermostat to register the temperature that would brown the bread without burning it.

Crowd sounds drifted in from the TV.

There was a soft sproing! sound and a spring about an inch long flew out of the toaster and landed on the table. The killer bent over and studied what he could see of the toaster’s mechanism. There was no sign of where the spring had come from, but he wasn’t worried. He could figure it out later. Or maybe the toaster didn’t even need the spring in order to work.

He suspected that more expensive toasters had some kind of thermostat and were controlled by heat rather than time. This one was a cheapy, bought for research rather than jelly or jam. Time now to put it back together.

It didn’t want to go back together. At least, not to its previous form. Not for the killer. The chrome cover wouldn’t go on straight, and he seemed to have broken the Bakelite handle on the lever that depressed the bread.

He picked up a smaller screwdriver and used it to pry the toaster’s cover. He needed only about an eighth of an inch. The sleek chrome body of the toaster still wouldn’t quite fit. He pried with the smaller screwdriver.

Yeow!

The damned thing was still hot!

And there was that damned spring, rolling off the table.

He went to the sink and filled a glass with cold water, then sat on a kitchen counter stool and soaked his left hand.

He found himself facing the TV. Someone, a man or woman, was on fire and crawling away from the burning truck.

The truck exploded. The person crawling away was enveloped in flames.

The killer removed his hand from the glass and dried it on a dish towel. His burned fingers didn’t look serious enough that he’d need ointment and a Band-Aid. He resumed reassembling the toaster.