Authors: John Lutz

Tags: #Thrillers, #Fiction, #Suspense, #Espionage, #General

Pulse (5 page)

BOOK: Pulse

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Central Florida, 2002

D
aniel was finishing topping off the SUV’s tank at the gas pump he’d managed to get working at the storm-damaged service station. The few people who drove past glanced at him but saw nothing unusual in what he was doing. The station obviously wasn’t open, but this wasn’t an ordinary time. People did what they must in order to survive.

“Have you seen a brown and white dog?” a female voice asked, causing Daniel to jump.

“Didn’t mean to scare you, mister.”

Daniel finished replacing the nozzle and turned around to see a thin girl about fourteen standing around ten feet from him. She was wearing a thin white T-shirt with MARLINS lettered on it, cut-off Levi’s, and brown leather sandals. The T-shirt was wet and her nipples were visible as dark nubs pressing out against the fabric.

“You didn’t scare me, sweetheart,” Daniel said. “Just startled me, is all. What’s wrong, you lost your dog?”

“Candy. I haven’t seen her since ...” Her eyes teared up and her breath caught in her throat. “... since me and my mom got under the bed at home.”

“Where is your mom?”

“She wasn’t moving when I left her. I’m sure she’s—”

“That’s okay, sweetheart.” Daniel went to her and hugged her. “And now you’re looking for Candy.”

“I saw her run away when the hurricane hit.”

“How far away did—do you live?”

“A good ways.” She pointed toward some wrecked houses that had been lined like soldiers on a side street.

Daniel looked at the girl more closely. “You never did tell me your name.”

“I’m Gretchen.”

“Nice name.”

“Whatever your name is, I think you get used to it.”

Daniel shrugged and smiled. “I’m Dan. Pleased to meet you.” He rubbed the back of his hand over his mouth and glanced around. “When a dog runs away in a storm, it’s usually the same way the wind was blowing. They do that to survive. You say Candy ran that way?” He pointed west.

Gretchen nodded.

“I’ll tell you what. I’m going that direction. You wanna hop in the SUV and I’ll drive you that way? Maybe up and down some of these streets where houses used to be, we can spot Candy.”

The girl didn’t hesitate. She smiled. “That’d be good.”

“Might work,” Daniel said.

He climbed in on the driver’s side and unlocked the door for Gretchen, then helped her climb up into the SUV.

“You keep a sharp eye out,” Daniel said, starting the engine. “So will I.”

He drove west, meandering some to get a closer look at a ruined building, or simply a pile of wreckage.

After about ten minutes he saw a house that was leveled, near a barn that was damaged but still standing. Nobody was in sight in any direction.

“Think I might have caught a look at a brown and white dog,” Daniel said, stopping the SUV. “Mighta gone behind that barn. Why don’t we—”

But Gretchen was out of the vehicle and running toward the barn.

Daniel drove after her, making sure he didn’t run over anything sharp. He parked the truck where it couldn’t be seen from the highway.

He was smiling.

“I don’t see her,” Gretchen said. “She mighta gone inside the barn.”

“Then let’s go in and look,” Daniel said.

He got down out of the SUV and followed Gretchen into the barn. It was dim inside, and there was nothing there but some old rusty tools and a tractor that looked as if it hadn’t run in years. And a length of rope draped over a peg in a supporting beam.

“Take a look there behind the tractor,” he told Gretchen.

While she was doing that, he went to the broad wooden door and tried to pull it shut. It wouldn’t move much, and jammed a couple of feet short of closing. That was okay, if there was a little light beyond what was leaking in through the separated wooden slats.

“How come you’re shutting the door?” Gretchen asked.

“If Candy’s in here, we wouldn’t want her running outside,” Daniel said.

Something in his voice must have alerted Gretchen. She gave him a wide-eyed look and bolted for the barn door.

Daniel tripped her, then lifted her and held her upright by her hair and marched her toward one of the stalls. She was surprisingly light and it was no effort.

He snatched the rope off the peg with his free hand along the way.

Gretchen was trembling with fear.

Daniel with anticipation.

New York, the present

T
he city was still in the sweaty grip of summer heat and humidity. Sal and Harold didn’t find much relief inside Macy Collins’s apartment building, but it was better than outside.

Macy had lived in 5E. Harold knocked on the door of 5D, and Sal took 5F. They would work their way in opposite directions around the hall. Usually old apartment buildings like this one smelled like urine, disinfectant, and over-fried bacon, in various mixture and degree. This building made a different and less offensive olfactory impression that Sal couldn’t quite place.

Nobody answered the knock on 5F’s door. Sal moved along to 5G and heard Harold meet someone and enter 5D. “Are you baking something?” Sal heard Harold ask, after identifying himself. “It smells wonderful.”

“Carrot cake,” said the voice of an older woman.

“I
love
carrot cake.”

“Your nose seems to be running. Do you need a handkerchief, detective?”

“That’s not—”

The door closed. That was fine with Sal.

The door he’d just knocked on opened, and a woman in her thirties smiled out at him. She was short and plump, and her dark hair, combed straight back as if she were standing in a stiff breeze, emphasized a sweet, fleshy face. She was perspiring heavily, and her apartment didn’t smell as good as the one Harold had drawn. “You’re with the police,” she said.

“I’m usually the one who says that,” Sal said.

“But I’m not,” the woman said. “I mean, with the police. You see, if you said—”

“I understand,” Sal said, wishing Harold had knocked on this door.

“I’m Charmain Graham,” the woman said, stepping back so he could enter. “Do you want to know if I was home last night? Did I see or hear anything unusual? Did I know the dead woman well? Do I have something to say that might provide information about the murder?”

“Do you want me to sit under a bright light while you question me?” Sal asked.

She appeared puzzled. “Why would I—” A wide, wide grin. “Oh, I see. You wondered, was I going to hamburger you.”

“Hamburger?”

“You know—grill you. That’s police slang.”

“I’ve never heard that one,” Sal said.

“It was on one of those CSI programs.”

Sal knew he was going to have difficulty with this woman. She seemed to see conversation as a kind of oblique jousting with rubber lances. She motioned for Sal to sit on a small sofa with a worn green slipcover. A ginger cat glared at him and then skulked away. “I won’t do anything with a telephone directory,” she said.

She had Sal there. Again. He sat and looked at her.

Charmain grinned. “Isn’t that what the police do sometimes with a stubborn suspect? Whack him in the head with a phone directory? So there are no marks?” She acted it out, swinging hard with her arms parallel to each other.

“That’s right,” Sal said, playing along. “The more serious crimes get the biggest boroughs.”

“Now you are joking with me.” Charmain Graham laughed. She had a nice, musical laugh. Sal found himself liking her, despite that fact that she might be certifiably insane.

“So did you?” Sal asked. “See or hear anything last night?”

“Anything suspicious, you mean?” She sat down in a small upholstered chair angled toward the sofa. The chair creaked a warning, but she ignored it. There was a low wooden coffee table between them, bare except for some back issues of
New York
magazine fanned out like a hand of cards. The apartment was cheaply furnished but impeccably clean and ordered. There was nothing superfluous. No gewgaws, no photographs. Sal had talked to plenty of potential witnesses like this; Charmain Graham was lonely and glad for the company, even if it meant there’d been a murder next door.

Sal shrugged and smiled at her. “Tell me anything that comes to mind. I’ll figure out whether it’s suspicious.”

“The policeman who was here earlier said the murder took place in the park, but the killer came here afterward to clean up. How weird is
that
? They know that’s what he did because of the blood all over—”

“Yes, we’ve already established that,” Sal said, putting a little bite in his already gruff voice. He wanted some free association here, but he didn’t want the conversation to go off a cliff.

Charmain got the message. She teetered for a moment as if about to lose her balance, and then righted herself, her fingertips touching the base of her throat, and assumed a new attitude. She was an actress in one of those
CSI
episodes now. “At approximately seven minutes after three this morning, I heard laughter from next door.”

“You mean Macy Collins’s apartment.”

“It would be her bedroom, to be exact,” Charmain said. “I couldn’t sleep, like usual, and I woke up about quarter to three and just laid there. You know, tired but mostly awake and hoping I’d pass out altogether. But all I could do was keep changing positions. I had the air conditioner on high, but it wasn’t doing much, so I went over to adjust it and found it had frozen up, like it does sometimes. It was shooting out little flecks of ice but not much of a breeze. Well, there’s nothing to do then but switch it off and wait for it to thaw out, which it does pretty fast in this weather.”

“So that’s when the room got quiet,” Sal said, trying to keep her on point.

“That’s right.”

“And you heard laughter.”

“Not right away. I went back to bed, but I still couldn’t sleep. Macy’s bedroom is—was—right on the other side of my bedroom wall. They’re thick walls, though, in this old building. Mostly soundproof. But there’s a vent near my bed, and it sort of magnifies sound. I heard moving around in Macy’s bedroom. Couldn’t tell what it was. And now and then a voice.”

“Voices?”

“No. Just a man’s voice. At least, I think it was a man. I can’t be positive. Nothing I could understand. Just a low murmur now and then. And then, after about ten minutes, he laughed.”

“How do you mean? Like a big guffaw?”

“What’s a guffaw?”

“I mean, do you think he might have thrown back his head and laughed real loud?”

“No, more like a chuckle.”

“I’m not sure what a chuckle sounds like.”

“More like he was amused than that he was slapping his thigh with laughter.”

“Have you ever seen anyone actually do that?” Sal asked. “Laugh real hard and slap their thigh?”

“No.”

“Did you hear Macy’s voice at all?”

“No. Not a peep. She was already dead, wasn’t she? In the park?”

“ ’Fraid so.” Sal folded his black leather-bound notepad and stood up. “I’d like to see your room. Where you were when you overheard the laughing.”

“Chuckling.”

“Sure.”

Charmain fought her way up out of her creaking chair and led the way into her bedroom.

“Did you know Macy well?” Sal asked.

“Hardly at all. She didn’t live here all that long, and she was always busy, always on the go. Like she didn’t have time to make friends. No, wait a minute. I did see her once with an older woman, eating at a diner over on Broadway. They seemed friendly enough, like they had lots to talk about.”

“How old was this older woman?”

“In her forties, I’d guess. But she was one of those sort of larger women who might look older than they are. You know what I mean?”

“Sure. Did she often entertain men in her apartment?”

“Not that I noticed.”

The bedroom was as neat as the living room. The bed and dresser were IKEA. There was a small TV on a table where it could be seen from the bed. The floor was bare hardwood but for a small black and red oval throw rug. In the one window, the air conditioner that sometimes froze up was softly humming away. The bed was tautly made with a pale blue spread. A tattered brown stuffed bear was lodged between the pillows. It looked uncomfortable.

“I’ve had Andy since I was a little girl,” Charmain explained, noticing Sal staring at the bear.

“Do you sleep on the right side of the bed?” Sal asked. “Or does Andy?”

“I do.”

“Near that vent?” Sal pointed toward narrow grillwork that had been painted over countless times and was now the same cream color as the walls.

“Near enough.” Charmain seemed slightly embarrassed.

“When you heard noises from Macy’s bedroom, did you get out of bed and put your ear to the vent so you could hear better?”

Her round face flushed. Then she seemed to gather herself and put on a don’t-give-a-damn expression. “Of course I did. Wouldn’t you?”

“To tell you the truth, yes,” Sal lied. Or thought he lied. He smiled at her. “Stay right here.” He moved briskly from the room.

Charmain stood where she was for a minute or so, and then sat down on the edge of the bed. Her back was rigid, as if she might leap up any second.

Sal returned shortly, glanced at his watch, then walked over and stooped low so he could place his ear against the vent.

Within a few seconds he heard Harold tell him that now was the time for all good men to come to the aid of something. Then Harold said, quite distinctly, “Ha, ha, ha.”

Sal straightened up and stretched his back. Charmain remained seated on the edge of her bed, smiling at him in a way he didn’t like.

“If Macy talked in bed, you could hear her,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You’ve heard her before?”

Charmain smiled. “I said she didn’t bring men home
often
, not never.”

“You heard them through the vent? Having sex?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“It seems to deepen voices. Turned my partner into a baritone.”

“When you say partner—”

“I mean fellow detective, just now, through the vent,” Sal said, wanting no misinterpretation.

Charmain kind of half closed her eyes and regarded him. “I guess sex does change people’s voices. A man like you, in your work, you must meet lots of women... .”

Sal knew where this was going and wished Harold was here. And just like that, as if wish were command, Harold walked into the bedroom.

“Did I come through loud and clear?” he asked.

“Loud enough, but not completely clear,” Sal said. He introduced Harold to Charmain.

“Would you like a Kleenex for your nose?” Charmain asked.

Harold thanked her and accepted a tissue from a box by the bed.

“Was I any help?” Charmain asked.

“Sure were,” Harold said.

“I mean, my testimony? Not the vent thing.”

“I thought you meant the tissue.”

“Yes and yes,” Sal said. Charmain had heard the killer celebrating with himself over the recent murder. She had helped to establish the time of death, but Sal saw no point in telling her that. And if the killer had been bouncing around in Macy’s bed, he might have left a good DNA sample. Or maybe he’d done that earlier in the evening, in the park. “You’ve been a big help,” he said. He moved toward the door. Harold and Charmain followed.

At the door to the hall, Charmain winked at Sal in a way that Harold wouldn’t notice. All this talk about murder seemed to have excited her. “If you need anything else, like more experiments with the vent, under more realistic circumstances, just let me know. I’m available.”

Sal just bet. He thanked her politely and formally for her help, then ushered Harold toward the elevator.

“That was nice of her, with the Kleenex,” Harold said on the way down to the lobby.

“It was because you smell like jet fuel,” Sal said.

“It was because she likes me,” Harold said, “and you’re jealous.”

Knowing Harold, Sal said nothing in reply.

BOOK: Pulse

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