Mister X. John Lutz

the street. The interesting people, that is. Not the simple working drones. They didn’t provide much entertainment.

      But the interesting people were something else. Of course, it took time and a lot of watching to locate the interesting ones; and the intriguing thing was, a few of the drones, after you watched them for a while, turned out to be interesting once you got to know and understand them.

      There was the insurance guy who spent most of his time masturbating or tossing darts at a poster of Angelina Jolie. The woman office manager who, locked in her own office, drank to excess and was having a hot affair that involved bondage with one of her female underlings. More conventional romance was a regular feature on the other side of a windowpane where the building stair-stepped to rise another ten floors. There a middle-aged bald man—the Carver had never figured out what sort of position he held—had at least three sexual trysts per week with a long-legged blond woman who was quite spectacular and didn’t seem to frequent that floor of the building except for services rendered to the man.

      A high-priced prostitute?

      No. She didn’t have that look about her, and she didn’t carry a purse or large bag. She seemed to work elsewhere in the building, though the Carver had never figured out where. She was definitely one of the interesting people.

      Considering the size of the building, all of this didn’t really seem an excessive amount of interesting activity. In fact, it was barely enough to keep the Carver occupied. Most of those whom he considered his unknowing “family” held some fascination, but less each day. They all seemed to be on treadmills of risk and relentlessness that would result in wearing out their luck. And like everything else, luck did eventually wear out.

      The Carver knew when not to push his luck. When not to use it up unnecessarily. And that resulted in a knack for sensing exactly when to leave the party.

      He had left the best party of his life at precisely the right time. He’d gotten away with murder. Five times. While the police were aimlessly dashing around and bouncing off bad ideas like blind mice. He was proud of that.

      The experts were wrong, of course. Serial killers didn’t necessarily finally fall victim to their compulsion. Sometimes it worked just as it was supposed to, exactly as they wanted it to work. They fed their compulsion, and they became sated.

      He hadn’t been much alarmed when television and newspapers suddenly became more interesting. When he learned that the Carver murders were being reinvestigated, and by Frank Quinn.

      The Carver had always regretted that the famous serial killer hunter was injured and laid up in a hospital, or pensioned off and involved in litigation, during the time of most of his greatest achievements. Quinn hadn’t had a chance to hunt for the Carver. The famous detective had been gunned down and seriously injured at the scene of a completely unrelated crime. A mundane liquor store holdup.

      But Quinn was on the case now, years later, when the trail was so cold that solving the crimes would be almost impossible.

      None of what had happened more than five years ago mattered much now, or provided any sort of handle for a reopened investigation. Time had built a wall and then an impenetrable fortress around the Carver.

      Maybe it was because he was invulnerable that he avidly followed news of the present investigation. Possibly he was waiting for news of Mary Bakehouse. So far, none had appeared. He had spared her, but always she’d carry a part of him with her because now he was a part of her. He lived in her brain and being. That might be a burden too heavy for her, too painful. She would probably try to hide from that burden, run from it, maybe all the way to the other side of the country. But it wouldn’t work. He would always be with her. He wouldn’t be surprised if he picked up the paper one day and read of Mary’s suicide. Perhaps he’d claim her as a victim after all.

      Would it all begin again then?

      No! He was finished with those times, those deeds. Thoughts. That was all he had now, and all he wanted. He didn’t need Mary Bakehouse’s death to fuel old embers. He could think about her any time he wanted, any way he wanted.

      Mary was why he followed the news. Mere curiosity.

      But he knew better. He tracked the news because old memories had stirred, and what lay dormant in him all those years, since what he’d considered to be his last murder, had slowly awakened and was pacing in his breast, sharing his heartbeats. A demon roused from its dreams.

      He found that frightening.

      He found it exhilarating.

      Pearl surfaced from her subway stop that evening and trudged through the humid dusk toward her apartment. The softened light gave the city a dreamlike quality, as if she were viewing it through a fine screen. What did they call it in theater? A scrim. This momentary surreal view of New York was beautiful, in its way. It painted a place where any dream might come true, as well as any nightmare.

      The meeting with Vitali and Mishkin had left Pearl feeling vaguely dissatisfied, though she didn’t know why. The two NYPD detectives had listened carefully while Quinn filled them in on the investigation and then gave them copies of whatever paperwork there was, including the clipping files given to them by Chrissie Keller—if the woman had been Chrissie Keller. Vitali and Mishkin had turned copies of the murder books over to Quinn and Associates. Everyone had been polite and professional, and nothing had really changed except that there were two more warm bodies on the case, representing Harley Renz’s political ass-covering. Nobody knew any more after the meeting than before.

      “At least,” Harold Mishkin had said from under his brushy, graying mustache, “we’re all getting paid. I mean, with the economy and all.”

      “That’s something,” Quinn had said, exchanging glances with Sal Vitali, who was grinning.

      “Harold always takes the practical view,” Vitali said.

      Pearl couldn’t keep her mouth shut. “It isn’t practical to have a client we can’t find, while we’re investigating murders that happened over five years ago, committed by a killer who, for all we know, is dead or living in another city.”

      “What?” Vitali growled in his gravel-pan voice. “You wanna quit?”

      Pearl sighed. “Can’t.”

      “The economy,” Mishkin said.

      “Not the economy,” Pearl said.

      Vitali winked at her and shrugged. “We soldier on.”

      “Only practical thing to do,” Quinn said, standing up.

      And the meeting was over.

      He watched his detectives trail from the office. They looked eager but tired. They knew that most of the case, the hardest part, still lay ahead of them. Phase two of the investigation had begun. It was one of those forks in the road nobody would consider significant until they looked back at it while driving over a cliff.

      PART II

      From their folded mates they wander far,

      Their ways seem harsh and wild:

      They follow the beck of a baleful star,

      Their paths are dream beguiled.

      —RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON, “Black Sheep”