Mister X. John Lutz

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СКАЧАТЬ killer’s last victim had a sister. A twin.”

      “A twin! And the surviving twin is your client?”

      “Uh-huh.”

      “Wonderful! The surviving twin wants vengeance. It’s almost poetic. It’s as if the murderer killed only half of his victim, and now the other half—”

      “However you want to play it,” Quinn said.

      “We have an arrangement, Quinn. Tell me more.”

      And he did. Not everything, of course, but just enough.

      After hanging up, he absently wiped his hand on his pants leg, as if Sellers had salivated over the phone.

      Fedderman was grinning at him. “Renz is gonna be so mad he might catch fire.”

      “Give me a can of gas,” Pearl said, rather absently.

      She was gazing at Quinn in a way he recognized, thoughtfully and slightly disturbed, as if she’d again discovered a new facet of his deviousness.

      “This will work out,” he assured her.

      Now there was something cautionary in her look, warning him that he’d done something possibly unwise as well as distasteful. Her “If you lie down with dogs…” look.

      “I can put up with fleas,” he said.

      She nodded and turned back to her computer. She’d known exactly what he’d been thinking. Incredible.

      Maybe her mouse pad was a Ouija board.

      “My, my, my,” Pearl said, reading over additional information about Geraldine Knott, the young woman who’d survived an attack eight years ago in Detroit by an assailant very much like the Carver.

      She remained seated at her computer. Quinn and Fedderman were standing behind her, looking over her shoulder at the monitor. They were all reading the old news item from the archives of a Detroit newspaper. It was accompanied by another blurred black-and-white photo. In this one Geraldine Knott was standing and leaning sideways, as if hoping the camera’s aim would miss her, holding both hands covering her face.

      This account of the attack was more detailed. It described how her masked assailant had gotten her on the ground and straddled her, kneeling on her upper arms to pin her to the parking garage’s concrete floor. He’d then shown her a knife and explained to her what he intended to do with it. As the news item quoted the tearful intended victim: “…slice off my nipples, do some creative carving on me, then carve me a big smile under my chin.” Fortunately for Geraldine Knott, her attacker had been frightened away.

      “He mentioned carving twice,” Quinn noted.

      “Could be early Carver,” Pearl said. “Or maybe some sicko imitating him.”

      “Except this woman was attacked before anybody’d ever heard of the Carver,” Fedderman pointed out.

      “Maybe this guy had heard of him and was imitating him even before he became famous,” Quinn suggested.

      Pearl said, “The odds on that are about the same as Fedderman wearing both socks right side out.”

      “Did I do that again?” Fedderman asked automatically, glancing down at his ankles and tugging up his pants legs.

      “Sure seems like this could be our guy,” Pearl said. “The way he showed the knife and told her what he was about to do, getting his jollies by scaring the hell out of her. Or maybe our sicko saw this news account when it was fresh in a Detroit paper and it stuck in his mind.”

      “I’d bet on Feds’s socks,” Quinn said.

      “Then you think this was early Carver?” Pearl asked.

      “I don’t know.”

      Fedderman unconsciously glanced down at his feet again. “So what are we gonna do with this information?”

      “Put it in the hopper,” Quinn said, “along with everything else we know or think we know.”

      “And then?” Fedderman asked.

      “Wait and see if someday it makes sense.”

      16

      Holifield, Ohio, 1992

      Jerry Grantland, thirteen years old last week, lowered himself from his bedroom window onto the soft carpet of lawn. He glanced at the luminous green hands of his Timex watch. One o’clock a.m.

      That was the time it usually happened.

      If it was going to happen.

      There were clouds, and the moon was only a sliver, like a glowing shaving from a larger carving. Jerry knew that once he made it across the dark stretch of lawn that was the shadow of the house, cast by the softly illuminated streetlight out near the curb, he’d be in almost total darkness. The rest would be easy. There was a wooden picket fence running the property line between his house and the Kellers’ side yard, but it was only four feet high. The nimble Jerry could be over it in seconds and on his way into the shadows of the overgrown honeysuckle bush.

      The bush would conceal him until he made it past the rosebushes and into the yews, where he could squat unseen in the darkness outside the Keller twins’ bedroom window.

      He knew where the twins, a year younger than he was, slept in their matching twin beds with their brass headboards. Tiffany’s bed was against the far wall, Chrissie’s nearer the window.

      Jerry found his familiar, comfortable place to squat on his heels and peer beneath the partly drawn shade into the room.

      Both girls appeared to be sleeping beneath thin white sheets that were pulled all the way up to their chins.

      Jerry thought it unlikely that they were sleeping. Like him, they were probably waiting.

      He watched as both girls stirred and stiffened. Tiffany sat straight up in bed and then lay down again. Both twins curled onto their sides, pretending to be asleep. The window was raised slightly to let in the night breeze, and Jerry thought he could hear the faint rustle of the sheets as the girls’ young bodies moved beneath them.

      Jerry let his thoughts about the Keller twins roam free, as he often did. If the twins knew what they did—and what was done to them—in his imagination, they’d be appalled. But they wouldn’t be surprised. In some ways they were interchangeable. In others—

      As he always did when it happened, Jerry drew in his breath.

      The bedroom door had opened and closed silently.

      The twins’ father, Mr. Keller—Ed Keller—was like a shadow in the room, but a shadow with substance.

      Jerry swallowed and stayed as still as possible at the window. He’d been sure Mr. Keller would enter the twins’ room. Mr. Keller was some kind of salesman and was out of town a lot. Whatever he sold had something to do with cars, with Detroit; that’s what either twin would say when Jerry СКАЧАТЬ