Slaughter - Lutz John (читать книги без txt) 📗

The train, a dragon of gray metal and reflective glass, roared before them and appeared for a moment that it was going to speed past and keep going. Then, with a screaming of steel on steel, it slowed rapidly and smoothly almost to a halt. It stopped and sat quietly. It was the 1 train, headed downtown, and like everyone on board, it had rules to obey.

Those waiting to board pressed forward. The woman, Margaret, had to assert herself and back up a step so she remained behind the yellow line. One of the pneumatic doors had stopped exactly in front of her and then hissed open. She was one of the first to board as the flow of passengers both ways met and then broke into two distinct lines, moving in opposite directions.

Jordan was near a door in the same car, only farther down the platform. He stepped inside just as the door was about to close.

There were no seats, so he stood with several others in the crowded car, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He could see Margaret seated near the door she had entered.

By the time the train stopped at West 42nd Street, in the theater district, it had taken on more passengers, and Jordan had to crane his neck now and then to catch sight of her.

There she was, standing up and edging toward the door.

He pushed toward her, using his elbows. Someone in the crowded car elbowed him back, but he ignored it. A little pain was a tonic to the system, as his mother had often told him.

He left the subway behind and followed Margaret toward the concrete steps leading to the sidewalk. As she pushed through a black iron revolving gate that looked designed to eat people, she didn’t glance back, but he doubted if she’d recognize him anyway. He’d let his hair grow, and it was combed back like dark wings over his ears.

Soon they surfaced into the loud, warm night. The sidewalk was almost as crowded as the subway, and he stayed close behind her.

After a block, she cut down a side street that was a mix of businesses, most of them restaurants, and residences. Some of the old brick and brownstone buildings had been subdivided into apartments. A few of them looked vacant.

Margaret paused in the glare of a streetlight, in front of a dentist’s office. She rummaged about in her purse until she found what looked like a key ring, then continued to the stoop of the next building. As she went up the steps, he watched her, mesmerized, listening to the clack of her high heels on the concrete steps. The rhythm and precision of her movements captivated him. The click and clack and sway and roll and rhythm and click and clack had a hypnotic effect on him that he couldn’t understand but must.

As she entered the building through an oversized oak door, he resisted a glance to the side.

He walked past her building and continued down the street, but he used his ballpoint pen to write her address on the palm of his left hand.

He pressed hard enough to make the hand bleed.

Margaret Evans stood leaning with her back pressed against the inside of her apartment door to the hall. She knew the man had been following her, picked up on the fact when she’d gotten on the subway and noticed him waiting, then timing his movements as he entered the same subway car before the doors closed and the train moved away.

It wasn’t all that unusual in Margaret’s life that a man might follow her to see where she was going. Usually they were harmless. Lonely guys killing time and looking for something to do. Dreamers who moved in her wake, waiting for their dreams to come true. With those guys, they were mostly too timid to approach her. Her late aunt Clara had told her more than once that women had little idea of the power they held over men. Men didn’t know it either, but were moved by it, sometimes even believing that they were the agents of change.

“You’re beautiful and will grow up to be even more beautiful,” her aunt had said. “You’re special and will have to understand more about men, how one day you are their friend and the next day their goddess.”

Clara had been dead for three years now. Margaret wished she’d listened more to what her aunt had said. There was a lot that the pancreatic cancer had cut short, or Margaret would have understood more about what made her special, and more about men. Such as why they sometimes need to destroy their goddesses.

Margaret was sure she’d never before seen the man who’d followed her to her apartment building. And probably he’d never seen her.

But sometimes, as Clara said, it was all in a look, or a certain movement in a certain light. Or . . . who knew what else? A person could glimpse another through a bus window and be in love for life.

Or something like love.

Jordan couldn’t get Margaret out of his mind. She was a mystery he had to explore. He pushed her away from his thoughts. There would be time for her. He would make time.

A mist closed in on him as he walked. Soon it became a light drizzle. He walked faster, then turned up his collar and broke into a jog. At the end of the block he turned left and climbed steps to the porch of a white-stone and brownstone building and went inside to a small foyer. A long, narrow stairwell ran to the second floor. Jordan climbed the stairs quickly, then stood before the single door at the top of the steps.

He waited for a count of fifty, then knocked on the door, as instructed. He didn’t look up at the camera mounted at a downward angle near the ceiling.

“Come in,” a woman’s voice said, almost bored.

He opened the door and stepped inside, aware of a scent of jasmine. The woman was sitting in a chair near the foot of a bed. Something had been done to extend the chair’s legs to make them longer. The chair resembled a throne. The tall, lean woman in black leather, seated calmly in the chair, brought to mind royalty and authority.

“Have you behaved yourself since we last met?” she asked.

“No, I have not.”

They both smiled.

“Go to my closet and open it,” she said. “Hanging on the back of the closet door is a whip. Bring it to me.”

Jordan obeyed.

14

Renz dropped by the Q&A office with what he described as new information. He drew a plain brown folder from his recently acquired calfskin attache case, and plopped it on Quinn’s desk in front of Quinn.

“Lab come up with something new?” Quinn asked.

“In a way. Those five women who were among the dead in the Off the Road fire. Two of them were in bathtubs and weren’t killed by the flames.”

Quinn leaned back in his desk chair, listening to its familiar squeal, and holding a pen lightly level with the thumb and index fingers of both hands, as if taking a measurement. “What? Did they fill the tubs with water so they might submerge holding their breath and wait the fire out?” Quinn had seen this attempted, ten years ago, and recalled that it hadn’t worked. The victims who thought they might find enough time to submerge and let the fire rage over and past them had been boiled alive. He experienced a vivid memory with an image that still haunted him. One of the boiled, a woman, hanging halfway out of the bathtub, her hair reduced to white ash, her eye sockets hollowed by the flames.

“You thinking about that Clovis Hotel fire?” Renz asked Quinn, which jolted Quinn. That was exactly the fire that was occupying his mind. Renz, a younger, slightly slimmer Renz, had also been at the Clovis fire.

“I think about it from time to time,” Quinn said.

Renz emitted a low, guttural laugh. “Some of those victims, you could stick a fork in ’em and serve ’em at a fancy restaurant. Tell the diners it was gourmet fare. You ever heard of lamb amirstan?”