Chill Of Night. John Lutz

business and got the job done, but her attendance record was abysmal. No one from the company had said anything to her, but they might. You could push them only so far. Besides, her job was the one thing in her life she liked. Her job and Lenny.

      Bev was fully dressed in her new mauve outfit, seated before a teakwood vanity she’d bought in Mexico and had shipped home, leaning forward and applying just the right shade of lipstick to complement the dress—red, but with the slightest touch of purple—when her heart almost stopped.

      She managed to start breathing again and turned to gaze back and up at the figure she’d glimpsed in the mirror. At the hand that held the object that was indeed what she’d first feared. A gun, a small one with some kind of bulky cylinder fitted to its barrel. She’d seen enough TV and movies to know what the object was—a silencer.

      Seated on the padded vanity chair, staring up at the intruder, she was aware of her insides melting away, heard a slight trickle, felt a warmth, and knew she’d wet herself. She began to cry, tightening her grip on the chair back with one hand, on the lipstick tube with the other. She begged with her eyes. It was unmistakable, her silent pleading. He did nothing, drawing out the moment. She managed to speak, but her voice caught in her throat and the words came out as a sob.

      “What’d I do? For God’s sake, what’d I do?”

      Then she knew. Floyd! Floyd must have hired someone to pretend—

      The silencer spat and a bullet thunked! through the thinly padded wooden chair back and clipped her spine before smashing through her heart.

      The way she dropped and her chin hit the edge of the vanity on the way down, it would have hurt like hell if she’d been alive.

      The killer gently pried the lipstick tube from her dead right hand.

      8

      Beam silently watched the NYPD computer genius da Vinci had sent.

      He looked about fourteen and seemed to know everything. It was obvious from the way the kid—actually in his twenties—had handled Beam’s five-year-old notebook computer that he knew his stuff. Soon there’d been talk of RAM and giga and mega and pixels while Beam looked on in gray mystification as his computer was upgraded and brought into the present world of tech.

      By the time the kid was finished, Beam was patched into the NYPD system and had gone wireless so he could use his computer anywhere in the apartment, or—the computer kid had assured him—various places outdoors, or in certain restaurants and entire areas that were set up for wireless.

      “That’s damned amazing,” Beam told the kid.

      “I don’t understand why anybody’d ever use a typewriter,” the kid replied. “Or how they ever got that complicated machinery to work at all.”

      “I don’t type, either,” Beam said.

      With a pitying shake of his head, the kid gathered up his bits and bytes and left. Beam watched him out and down the hall to the elevator.

      Beam closed the door and looked at his watch. Almost four o’clock, when da Vinci had told him by phone that detectives Nell Corey and Fred Looper were coming to the apartment to meet Beam to get acquainted and have a strategy session.

      Moving out to the middle of the living room, Beam looked around. It was a pleasant room with a hardwood floor, throw rugs, a comfortable overstuffed cream-colored sofa, a tan leather armchair, smaller, rose-colored upholstered chair, green marble-top coffee table, some oil paintings on the walls, bought more as decorative pieces than as art. Lani’s touch. For that reason, maybe, Beam didn’t want to settle down in the room with Corey and Looper.

      He used both hands to lift the rose-colored chair—Lani’s chair—and carried it down the hall and into his den.

      The chair didn’t go with the den’s decor, but that was okay. Three of the den’s walls were oak paneled, the fourth painted off-white and covered with framed photos or department commendations. A baseball trophy sat on a table with some other framed photos. Some of the photos were of Beam and Lani, sometimes with their son Bud, who’d played All American minor league ball in the Cincinnati farm system in Florida and been struck in the head by a pitched ball. He’d died the next day of massive subdural hematoma. Only nineteen years old, and his death had killed something in Beam and Lani, in their marriage. The pitcher who’d hit Bud, a retread player named Rowdy Logan, had also aimed for his head on the previous pitch, so it was a deliberate beaning. Logan had been demoted from the majors for similar headhunting, and this time charges were brought against him. Charges that were going nowhere. Murder on the baseball diamond was a difficult thing to prove.

      That was something Beam owed da Vinci. Da Vinci said he had connections in Florida and could help to actually prosecute Logan. As it turned out, that wasn’t necessary, as Logan was found a few days later full of barbiturates that had given him the courage to shoot himself in the head. The bullet had struck with the same effect that the ninety-mile-per-hour fastball had on young Bud Beam.

      Justice, delivered not by the legal system but by the killer himself. Beam’s faith in the system he served had been severely shaken. As had his faith in everything.

      Seven years ago. First Bud gone, now Lani.

      Beam placed the rose-colored chair at an angle facing his large mahogany desk. There was already a brown leather chair in a similar position at the other corner of the desk. Beam would have the two detectives sit in the chairs, facing him across the desk. They would talk. They would plan. They would take the first step in finding and stopping the maniac who was killing people in his city.

      At first, hesitant to take on the case, Beam now was beginning to feel the old eagerness take hold. He was on the job again. He was a cop. He was a hunter set to stalk his prey.

      Exactly what da Vinci wants.

      “You home, Bev?” Floyd Baker called.

      He stood just inside the apartment door, his golf club bag slung over his shoulder. Something about the place wasn’t right. It wasn’t just that it was twilight and the apartment was dim without a lamp on. Or that his wife Bev wasn’t yet home from work. She often stayed late on the job.

      It was something else making him uneasy.

      It was the stillness.

      Floyd Baker had been an Army Ranger in action with UN troops in Kosovo. He and another ranger had once come across a house with its front door hanging open, and investigated to find an entire family of five slaughtered inside.

      The feeling, the stillness, the subtle scent he was experiencing now made Floyd think of that house, that day, what they’d found. Jesus, what we found! His heart clawed its way into his throat.

      “Bev!” There was a note of desperation in his call.

      He leaned his golf bag against the wall by the door and moved farther into the dim apartment, then switched on a floor lamp.

      Still no sign of Bev, but there was her purse on the table near the door. He hadn’t noticed it before. It meant she was probably home.

      The sight of the purse filled Floyd with even more dread.

      He made his way across the living room, down the hall, past the kitchen to the bedroom, and looked inside. He noticed immediately that, though the bedroom was dim, the bathroom light was on.

      When he went to investigate he found his wife in the alcove between the bedroom and bathroom, where she had her mirrored vanity set up. She was sprawled on the floor, and at first he thought she’d possibly fainted. Prayed she’d fainted.

      Then he saw the red letter J smeared on the vanity mirror with what looked like lipstick.

      Nothing Bev would do.

      He moved nearer, looked closer.

      “Ah, Jesus! Bev!”

      He leaned toward her to touch her, then realized he shouldn’t. And his right foot was planted