Night Victims. John Lutz

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ and then Sally was asleep.

      Not yet opening her eyes, she awoke slowly, becoming gradually aware that she couldn’t move. The dream she’d had was half remembered, movement soft and subtle about her body, around, beneath, so gentle…It was enough to disturb her sleep but not quite wake her.

      Until now.

      Sally was lying on her back in the dim bedroom, her arms at her sides. One palm was pressed flat to her hip, the other turned outward so that her arm was twisted and ached at the shoulder. She tried to move the arm that hurt, and it didn’t budge. What the hell? How did I get so twisted up in the sheet? The night was warm and there was no blanket or bedspread over the sheet. She should be able to at least goddamn move!

      Her eyes were open to slits now, and she could barely lift her head from the pillow to squint and try to see her feet, which were pressed so tightly together that it hurt her ankles. Her calves, thighs, and knees were pressed just as firmly to each other. The area of taut white sheet she could see was wound about her so tightly that her breasts were compressed.

      Still, half awake, she was more puzzled than afraid.

      Then her heart leaped and began to pound. Movement! Off to the left! Something large and quick! Had she imagined it? She swiveled her head this way and that on the perspiration-soaked pillow, craning her neck so it ached.

      But she saw nothing alarming other than the window next to the one that held the humming air conditioner. It was open!

      I locked it! I know I locked it!

      She wasn’t alone!

      Then the mattress creaked and sagged and the form she’d glimpsed was looming above her, straddling her, lithe and angular, large and powerful and dim as the dusk. She tried to scream but her throat was paralyzed. Something was jammed in her mouth, then slapped across her lips, binding them shut. Pain flared in her right side, a deep stinging sensation almost like an insect bite. Bug off! she thought inanely, her mind jumping to the play and casting problems even as she tried to scream against the pressure in and against her mouth, even as she tried to move her arms, her fingers, anything!

      Another stinging sensation in her side. Another. Each more painful than the last, and she could only lie mutely and endure, her eyes bulging, her entire body vibrating in agony inside its shroud. Sally knew she was going to die.

      End this! she screamed silently. End it, please!

      But she was helpless, staring up at the angular dark form above her, into unblinking black eyes that gazed into hers and searched patiently inside her for her pain, for her death. Not to find her death but to avoid it. For a while. Forever.

      End it! Please!

      2

      NYPD Homicide Detective Paula Ramboquette pulled the unmarked car to the curb in front of the Layton Arms apartments on East 56th Street. She’d been in New York almost a year now, and this was the first case where she, and not her partner Roy Bickerstaff, was lead detective. This was because Bickerstaff was retiring and would be gone by the end of the month.

      A large, potbellied man who favored cut-rate woolly suits and ineffective cheap deodorant even in summer, Bickerstaff sat still in his seat and waited for Paula before raising his bulk out of the car. He did have a certain sensibility she hadn’t noticed at first, and he was a good detective. And God knew Paula had seen worse.

      The uniformed doorman had emerged from the lobby and was walking toward them, not realizing the unmarked was a police car like the rest of the cruisers angled in at the curb. He was a short, dark-haired man with an aggressive curved nose that reminded Paula of a beak, and he was waving them away. “This space is for police,” Paula heard him say through the glass. “We have an emergency here today.”

      “Straighten this bird out, Roy,” Paula said, thinking Bicker-staff, in his rumpled brown suit, would be quite a contrast with the hawklike doorman in his royal blue outfit with gold epaulets. While the wheezing Bickerstaff opened the car door and squeezed out, she glanced over her shoulder for on-coming traffic, then climbed out on the driver’s side.

      Despite being sartorially outranked, Bickerstaff had been persuasive. By the time Paula had gotten around the car, the doorman was holding one of the glass front doors open for them. “Ms. Bridge is on thirty,” he said politely, as if she were expecting them. Which Paula knew was impossible because Ms. Bridge was dead.

      Paula and Bickerstaff crossed a tile lobby with a square blue area rug and gray leather furniture. Everything looked new and unsat on or unwalked on. Back In New Orleans, Paula had worked the Garden District and was more used to decaying elegance than this kind of contemporary tidiness.

      They zipped up to thirty in a polished steel, hexagonal elevator that reflected them so many times it made Paula feel as if she were standing in a crowd. Not much high-speed elevatoring in the Garden District, either.

      It was easy enough to find Sally Bridge’s apartment on the thirtieth floor. Hers was the one with the door open and the blue uniforms lounging nearby in the hall.

      “Ms. Bridge still at home?” Bickerstaff asked, still caught in the doorman’s mood of civility.

      “You mean have they removed the body?” one of the uniforms asked. Then answered his own question. “No, she’s still at your disposal.”

      Bickerstaff gave the man a glance and waited like a gentleman for Paula to enter before him. Old school.

      And it was Paula who led the way past the techs dusting for prints and into the bedroom where the body lay. As they entered the room, she noticed that the door frame near the latch was splintered. The door had been forced.

      The assistant ME was still there, a seedy little guy even more rumpled than Bickerstaff. Paula had seen him around and remembered him because his name was actually Harry Potter. And he looked like Harry Potter, grown up and gone to…well, pot. Put on a little weight, lost most of his hair, wore a different style of glasses. Still had the calm, intelligent look, though.

      Paula had pinned her shield on her lapel in the lobby, and now identified herself and Bickerstaff.

      Potter straightened up from the body on the bed and stared at her. “What kinda accent is that?”

      “Cajun,” Paula said. “Is this Ms. Bridge?”

      Potter nodded. “The late. She departed this world sometime last night, past midnight.”

      “We all want to die in bed,” Bickerstaff said.

      “Not like that.”

      “Sex crime,” Bickerstaff said, as they all stared at the dead woman on the bed. She still had on a short nightgown, though it had worked up over her breasts, and the bed was stripped down to the mattress pad. Bloodied white sheets were in a pile at the foot of the bed. Bickerstaff bent over the stained linen. “The sheets were stabbed lots of times like she was.”

      “Over three dozen times, actually,” Potter said. “At least that’s what we’ve found so far. And she doesn’t appear to have been sexually violated. Though we’ll have to check more closely for semen.”

      “There’s different kinds of sex,” Bickerstaff said.

      Paula СКАЧАТЬ