Chill Of Night. John Lutz

she sought: both jury trials had been for charges of first degree homicide—and both defendants had gone free.

      That did it—the letter Js in the Selig and Cohen murders really did stand for Justice—unless somebody came up with a more likely possibility.

      Two additional victims. Jury forepersons. Trials gone sour. Consistency. Confirmation.

      Nell braced herself with both palms on the table and stood up. Her body was stiff from sitting for hours, but she was so nervous she started to pace. Her blood might be half adrenaline. She was eager for action, any kind of action. She felt great. She’d never been more than merely competent with a computer, and now look what she’d done. You could never tell about yourself. This was something. She was a geek!

      She took several long strides to reach the phone, then hesitated when she noticed the time on her watch.

      Past midnight. Beam would be asleep. Looper, too, dozing blissfully next to his wife, unless the snoring that Nell had endured in the car during stakeouts hadn’t driven Mrs. Looper to a separate room. Despite the unpleasant notion, Nell found herself wondering whimsically what it might be like to be married again, this time to someone who loved her and acted like it. She was finding being single more and more problematic. It was like drifting through life as a ghost.

      Don’t be an idiot. You’ve got your independence, and everything that means. And you’ve got your job. Your work. Maybe someday you’ll even live down the trouble with the shooting and the missing knife, the shooting that was goddamned righteous.

      Don’t rake up the past.

      Focusing on the computer monitor, she felt her adrenaline kick in again and quicken her pulse.

      Nell took a deep breath, then released it slowly.

      She was calmer now, and more objective. So she’d hit pay dirt with her computer research. What did it mean? There were certainly two more Justice Killer victims; he’d been killing in New York for the past four years, but now he was picking up the pace.

      That was predictive in serial killers. Really not such a big surprise.

      Maybe Beam and Looper wouldn’t be so impressed. Maybe she was exhausted and making too much of her find. Possibly she’d make a fool of herself by not waiting till morning to share her success. After all, if you held it up and looked at it, there wasn’t much there that couldn’t wait till morning.

      Nell thought about it and decided again not to call and share her information. Not at this hour.

      She rethought.

      She picked up the phone and punched out Beam’s number hard enough to hurt her fingers.

      14

      Melanie Taylor was juror number five and would act as foreperson in the capital criminal trial of Richard Simms, the rapper known professionally as Cold Cat.

      Melanie was thirty-nine, single, and office manager of Regal Trucking, a general hauling company with executive offices in lower Manhattan. She’d been married briefly, to a man who turned out not to love her when it was discovered she’d be unable to bear children. The divorce had been fifteen years ago, and she hadn’t again considered marriage. It was, after all, about children.

      Her heart-shaped face, radiant smile, and generous figure had garnered her more than a few proposals of marriage. Some of the proposals she’d accepted, but without the marriage part. She was living alone now, in a small apartment in Tribeca, and seeing no one romantically. After her last bitter parting, she’d decided to take time off from romance—maybe the rest of her life.

      “…can be no doubt that he dearly loved his wife, Edie Piaf,” Robert Murray, Cold Cat’s attorney was saying.

      Melanie’s gaze went from Murray to Richard Simms, whom she could think of by no name other than Cold Cat. She’d heard some of his songs, violent, assaults on the ear, full of deprecating lyrics about society in general, and women in particular. He didn’t look at all angry or menacing now, a rather placid seeming black man about thirty, with pleasant, even features and liquid dark eyes. His hair was cropped short, and he was wearing a well cut conservative gray suit, white shirt, blue tie. To Melanie, he appeared more the type to be selling insurance or continuing his education than the author and performer of his big hit “Do the Bitch Snitch!” As the prosecutor had pointed out, the song advocated using a knife in unpleasant ways on a woman who’d turned evidence over to the police. But Cold Cat wasn’t on trial for cutting or stabbing his wife, the singer Edie Piaf. Allegedly, he’d shot her.

      Murray, a smiling, calm man with rust-colored hair and a spade-shaped red beard, paced before the jury and talked soothingly of Cold Cat’s many musical accomplishments, his generosity to artists less talented or fortunate than himself, his participation in charity performances for AIDS victims and starving children.

      “I must object!” Nick Farrato, the lead prosecuting attorney, blurted out, standing up from his chair as if jerked by strings. “Mr. Murray seems to be nominating Cold Cat for sainthood rather than making an opening statement. This defendant is the man who writes songs about slaughtering women, and who took his own lyrics too seriously and willfully—”

      “You shut your lyin’ mouth!”

      Astounded, Melanie and the rest of the jurors turned in their chairs and saw a heavyset black woman standing near the middle of the crowded courtroom. Farrato, a chesty little man in a dark blue suit, normally cocky as Napoleon, was momentarily nonplussed by the outburst.

      “You know nothin’ ’bout my boy, you fat-headed piece of shit. You gonna be sued yourself, you don’t watch that ugly mouth of yours.”

      Laughter rippled through the courtroom, but it was nervous laughter.

      Judge Ernestine Moody, a somber African American woman with gray hair and deeply seamed features, was the only one who seemed unsurprised and unshaken. Melanie figured Judge Moody had seen it all.

      “I’m going to ask you once to sit down and be orderly, ma’am,” she said to the woman making all the fuss.

      “I sit you down, you keep messin’ with my boy!” the woman said, bringing gasps this time rather than laughter.

      And Melanie understood. This was Cold Cat’s mother. Late forties, overweight, overdressed, overheated, mad as hell.

      Still, the judge was unmoved. “Ma’am—”

      “I ma’am you, the way you helping these police an’ bald-faced lyin’ lawyers tell what ain’t true an’ railroadin’ my boy straight to jail. You think I’m gonna sit here an’ watch that happen?”

      “Ma’am—”

      “That ain’t gonna happen!”

      Murray was sidling up the far aisle, a smile stuck on his face, motioning with his arms for his client’s mother to sit down.

      The judge simply sighed and nodded to the bailiff, a husky blond man, who in turn nodded to a uniformed patrolman on the other side of the courtroom. The one in uniform made a hand motion that stopped Murray, and he and the bailiff converged on Cold Cat’s mother.

      That was when Cold Cat leaped to his feet. “You best leave my mom alone. Lay a hand on her an’ I’ll buy your ass and sell it to somebody not gonna treat it kindly.”

      From somewhere behind the bench two more uniformed cops appeared, a beefy man and a small, determined looking woman. They grabbed Cold Cat and forced him back down in his chair. Farrato was dancing around now, waving his short, stocky arms and objecting to everything. He finally lapsed into simply yelling, “Outrage! Outrage!”

      Cold Cat’s mother calmed down immediately when the two men reached her, as if she’d suddenly been shot through with a mild anesthetic that allowed her enough consciousness to remain on her feet, but no more. Braced between the two men, she accompanied them from the courtroom without a struggle until they reached the doors behind the gallery. Then she turned suddenly, as if she’d