In a couple of steps he reached the seventeenth floor. In two more jumps he came to rest against the sixteenth-story window ledge—where Frank Bollinger had decided to set up an ambush.
The window was closed. However, the drapes had been drawn back. One desk lamp glowed dimly in the office.
Bollinger was on the other side of the glass, a huge silhouette. He was just lifting the latch.
No! Graham thought.
In the same instant that his boots touched the window ledge, he kicked away from it.
Bollinger saw him and pulled off a shot without bothering to open the rectangular panes. Glass sliced into the night.
Although Bollinger reacted fast, Graham was already out of his line of fire. He swung back to the wall seven or eight feet below Bollinger, rappelled again, stopped at the fifteenth-story window.
He looked up and saw flame flicker briefly from the muzzle of the pistol as Bollinger shot at Connie.
The gunfire threw her off her pace. She hit the wall with her shoulder again. Frantic, she got her feet under her and rappelled.
Bollinger fired again.
41
Bollinger knew that he hadn’t scored a hit on either of them.
He left the office, ran to the elevator. He switched on the control panel and pushed the button for the tenth floor.
As the lift descended, he thought about the plan that he and Billy had formulated yesterday.
“You’ll kill Harris first. Do what you want with the woman, but be sure to cut her up. ”
“I always cut them up. That was my idea in the first place. ”
“You should kill Harris where it’ll cause the least
mess, where you can clean up after. ”
“Clean up?”
“When you’re done with the woman, you’ll go back to Harris, wipe up every speck of blood around him, and wrap his body in a plastic tarp. So don’t kill him
on a carpet where he’ll leave stains. Take him into a room with a tile floor. Maybe a bathroom. ”
“Wrap him in a tarp?”
’7’11 be waiting behind the Bowerton Building at ten o’clock. You’ll bring the body to me. We’ll put it in the car. Later, we can take it out of the city, bury it upstate someplace. ”
“Bury it? Why?”
“We’re going to try to make the police think that Harris has killed his own fiancée, that he’s the Butcher. I’ll disguise my voice and call Homicide. I’ll claim to be Harris, and I’ll tell them I’m the Butcher. ”
“To mislead them?”
“You’ve got it. ”
“Sooner or later they’ll smell a trick. ”
’Yes, they will. Eventually. But for a few weeks, maybe even for a few months, they’ll.be after Harris. There wouldn’t be any chance whatsoever that they’d follow a good lead, one that might bring them to us. ”
“A classic red herring.”
“Precisely.
”
“It’ll give us time. ”
“Yes. ”
“To do everything we want. ”
“Nearly everything. ”
The plan was ruined.
The clairvoyant was too damned hard to kill.
The doors of the lift slid apart.
Bollinger tripped coming out of the elevator. He fell.
The pistol flew out of his hand, clattered against the wall.
He got to his knees and wiped the sweat out of his eyes.
He said, “Billy?”
But he was alone.
Coughing, sniffling, he crawled to the pistol, clutched it in his right hand and stood up.
He went into the dark hall, to the door of an office that would have a view of Lexington.
Because he was worried about running out of ammunition, he used only one shot on the door. He aimed carefully. The boom! echoed and reechoed in the corridor. The lock was damaged, but it wouldn’t release altogether. The door rattled in its frame. Rather than use another bullet, he put his shoulder to the panel, pressed until it gave inward.
By the time he reached the Lexington Avenue windows, Harris and the woman had passed him. They were two floors below.
He returned to the elevator. He was going to have to go outside and confront them when they reached the street. He pushed the button for the ground floor.
42
Braced against the eighth-floor windows, they agreed to cover the final hundred and twenty feet in two equal rappels, using the fourth-floor window posts as their last anchor points.
At the fourth level, Graham smashed in both rectangular panes. He snapped a carabiner to the post, hooked his safety tether to the carabiner, and jerked involuntarily as a bullet slapped the stone a foot to the right of his head.
He knew at once what had happened. He turned slightly and looked down.
Bollinger, in shirt sleeves and looking harried, stood on the snow-shrouded sidewalk, sixty feet below.
Motioning to Connie, Graham shouted, “Go in! Get inside! Through the window!”
Bollinger fired again.
A burst of light, pain, blood: a bullet in the back....
Is this where it happens? he wondered.
Desperately, Graham used his gloved fist to punch out the shards of glass that remained in the window frame. He grabbed the center post and was about to drag himself inside when the street behind him was suddenly filled with a curious rumbling.
A big yellow road grader turned the corner into Lexington Avenue. Its large black tires churned through the slush and spewed out an icy liquid behind. The plow on the front of the machine was six feet high and ten feet across. Emergency beacons flashed on the roof of the operator’s cab. Two headlights the size of dinner plates popped up like the eyes of a frog, glared through the falling snow.
It was the only vehicle in sight on the storm-clogged street.
Graham glanced at Connie. She seemed to be having trouble disentangling herself from the lines and getting through the window. He turned away from her, waved urgently at the driver of the grader. The man could barely be seen behind the dirty windshield. “Help!” Graham shouted. He didn’t think the man could hear him over the roar of the engine. Nevertheless, he kept shouting. “Help! Up here! Help us!”
Connie began to shout too.
Surprised, Bollinger did exactly what he should not have done. He whirled and shot at the grader.
The driver braked, almost came to a full stop.
“Help!” Graham shouted.
Bollinger fired at the machine again. The slug ricocheted off the steel that framed the windshield of the cab.
The driver shifted gears and gunned the engine.
Bollinger ran.
Lifted by hydraulic arms, the plow rose a foot off the pavement. It cleared the curb as the machine lumbered onto the sidewalk.
Pursued by the grader, Bollinger ran thirty or forty feet along the walk before he sprinted into the street. Kicking up small clouds of snow with each step, he crossed the avenue, with the plow close behind him.
Connie was rapt.
Bollinger let the grader close the distance between them. When only two yards separated him from the shining steel blade, he dashed to one side, out of its way. He ran past the machine, came back toward the Bowerton Building.
The grader didn’t turn as easily as a sports car. By the time the driver had brought it around and was headed back, Bollinger was standing under Graham again.
Graham saw him raise the gun. It glinted in the light from the street lamp.
At ground level where the wind was a bit less fierce, the shot was very loud. The bullet cracked into the granite by Graham’s right foot.
The grader bore down on Bollinger, horn blaring.
He put his back to the building and faced the mechanical behemoth.
Sensing what the madman would do, Graham fumbled with the compact, battery-powered rock drill that was clipped to his waist belt. He got it free of the strap.
The grader was fifteen to twenty feet from Bollinger, who aimed the pistol at the windshield of the operator’s cab.
From his perch on the fourth floor, Graham threw the rock drill. It arched through sixty feet of falling snow and hit BoMinger—not a solid blow on the head, as Graham had hoped, but on the hip. It glanced off him with little force.
Nevertheless, the drill startled Bollinger. He jumped, put a foot on ice, pitched forward, stumbled off the curb, skidded with peculiar grace in the snow, and sprawled facedown in the gutter.
The driver of the grader had expected his quarry to run away
;
instead, Bollinger fell toward the machine, into it. The operator braked, but he could not bring the grader to a full stop within only eight feet.
The huge steel plow was raised twelve inches off the street
;
but that was not quite high enough to pass safely over Bollinger. The bottom of the blade caught him at the buttocks and gouged through his flesh, rammed his head, crushed his skull, jammed his body against the raised curb.
Blood sprayed across the snow in the circle of light beneath the nearest street lamp.
43
MacDonald, Ott, the security guards and the building engineer had been tucked into heavy plastic body bags supplied by the city morgue. The bags were lined up on the marble floor.
Near the shuttered newsstand at the front of the lobby, half a dozen folding chairs had been arranged in a semi-circle. Graham and Connie sat there with Ira Preduski and three other policemen.
Preduski was in his usual condition: slightly bedraggled. His brown suit hung on him only marginally better than a sheet would have done. Because he had been walking in the snow, his trouser cuffs were damp. His shoes and socks were wet. He wasn’t wearing galoshes or boots
;
he owned a pair of the former and two pairs of the latter, but he never remembered to put them on in bad weather.
“Now, I don’t mean to mother you,” Preduski said to Graham. “I know I’ve asked before. And you’ve told me. But I’m worried. I can’t help it. I worry unnecessarily about a lot of things. That’s another fault of mine. But what about your arm? Where you were shot. Is it all right?”
Graham lightly patted the bandage under his shirt. A paramedic with bad breath but sure hands had attended to him an hour ago. “I’m just fine.”
“What about your leg?”
Graham grimaced. “I’m no more crippled now than I was before all this happened.”
Turning to Connie, Preduski said, “What about you? The doc with the ambulance says you’ve got some bad bruises.”
“Just bruises,” she said almost airily. She was holding Graham’s hand. “Nothing worse.”
“Well, you’ve both had a terrible night. Just awful. And it’s my fault. I should have caught Bollinger weeks ago. If I’d had half a brain, I’d have wrapped up this case long before you two got involved.” He looked at his watch. “Almost three in the morning.” He stood up, tried unsuccessfully to straighten the rumpled collar of his overcoat. “We’ve kept you here much too long. Much too long. But I’m going to have to ask you to hang around fifteen or twenty minutes more to answer any questions that the other detectives or forensics men might have. Is that too much to ask? Would you mind? I know it’s a terrible, terrible imposition. I apologize.”
“It’s all right,” Graham said wearily.
Preduski spoke to another plainclothes detective sitting with the group. “Jerry, will you be sure they aren’t kept more than fifteen or twenty minutes?”
“Whatever you say, Ira.” Jerry was a tall, chunky man in his late thirties. He had a mole on his chin.
“Make sure they’re given a ride home in a squad car.”
Jerry nodded.
“And keep the reporters away from them.”
“Okay, Ira. But it won’t be easy.”
To Graham and Connie, Preduski said, “When you get home, unplug your telephones first thing. You’ll have to deal with the press tomorrow. But that’s soon enough. They’ll be pestering you for weeks. One more cross to bear. I’m sorry. I really am. But maybe we can keep them away from you tonight, give you a few hours of peace before the storm.”
“Thank you,” Connie said.
“Now, I’ve got to be going. Work to do. Things that ought to have been done long ago. I’m always behind in my work. Always. I’m not cut out for this job. That’s the truth.”
He shook hands with Graham and performed an awkward half bow in Connie’s direction.
As he walked across the lobby, his wet shoes squished and squeaked.
Outside, he dodged some reporters and refused to answer the questions of others.
His unmarked car was at the end of a double line of police sedans, black-and-whites, ambulances and press vans. He got behind the wheel, buckled his safety belt, started the engine.
His partner, Detective Daniel Mulligan, would be busy inside for a couple of hours yet. He wouldn’t miss the car.
Humming a tune of his own creation, Preduski drove onto Lexington, which had recently been plowed. There were chains on his tires
;
they crunched in the snow and sang on the few bare patches of pavement. He turned the corner, went to Fifth Avenue, and headed downtown.
Less than fifteen minutes later, he parked on a tree-lined street in Greenwich Village.
He left the car. He walked a third of a block, keeping to the shadows beyond the pools of light around the street lamps. With a quick backward glance to be sure he wasn’t observed, he stepped into a narrow passageway between two elegant townhouses.
The roofless walkway ended in a blank wall, but there were high gates on both sides. He stopped in front of the gate on his left.
Snowflakes eddied gently in the still night air. The wind did not reach down here, but its fierce voice called from the rooftops above.
He took a pair of lock picks from his pocket. He had found them a long time ago in the apartment of a burglar who had committed suicide. Over the years there had been rare but important occasions on which the picks had come in handy. He used one of them to tease up the pins in the cheap gate lock, used the other pick to hold the pins in place once they’d been teased. In two minutes he was inside.