be examined closer by the police. You’ll stay out of it, won’t you?”
“Sure. You got no worry over me. You wanna talk to me some more, I be right downstairs from here. I stay clean. Outta trouble with no law.”
“Good.” Beam smiled at her. Nell sensed that he genuinely liked the hapless young woman.
“You think it woulda worked?” Candy Ann asked as they were leaving and closing the damaged door.
“What’s that?” Beam asked.
“Them designer shell phones. You think people really woulda bought ’em?”
“No,” Beam said.
Candy Ann smiled. “Tha’s what I been thinkin’.”
13
Nell sat hunched over her notebook computer at her kitchen table, scouring various data bases from around the country. Wind-driven rain peppered the window. At her right elbow was half a glass of diet root beer with ice in it. She’d gulped down the other half. Her upper lip, which she now and then unconsciously licked, was rimmed with foam from the root beer.
The tiny apartment was still warm from the heat of the day, and all the more humid from the rain. The window air conditioner in the living room had stopped working. She had a call in to a guy whose name a Manhattan South detective had given her, a repairman and sometimes actor who’d done work for some other cops and given them a break. The problem was, the guy-Terry Adams-was seemingly impossible to contact. No doubt he was enjoying his season of being much in demand, the man with a corner on cold air. The thought kind of pissed off Nell. After half a dozen calls, she’d left a curt message telling him she was about to perish and would he please call back, and soon.
On the floor next to her was a folded New York Post. The headline read JUSTICE KILLER JOLTS CITY. The Times and Daily News had similar headlines. Nell thought the killer would probably approve of the title the media had bestowed on him. It was probably exactly what he was seeking with his letter J calling cards.
She huddled closer to her glowing laptop. Though it was slightly cooler in the kitchen than the rest of the apartment, this was still painstaking work. She’d exhausted NYPD data bases, the federal National Crime Information Center bank, and was reduced to hooking into various obscure sites with no, or unofficial, affiliations with investigative agencies. These websites were mostly the work of skilled amateurs, and not all of them were reliable. But in conjunction with established data banks, they might prove useful. One didn’t need to be a computer genius to do this, but one did need to be obsessive, relentless, and tireless. Right now, Nell was having difficulty with tireless.
It was almost midnight, and the summer storm blew more rain against the window and rattled the glass. Beneath the bottom of the old wooden frame, Nell saw moisture appear, build to form a small drop, then track down an ancient stain toward the baseboard. It made it about halfway before spending itself and disappearing. Another drop formed, wavered, then began its unsteady downward course. Nell watched it, hypnotized, her fingers stilled on the keyboard. Would it make it farther than the last drop?
Would it…
What the hell?
She was awake with a start, staring at the computer’s small screen.
She realized she’d fallen asleep and her hand had slid from the keyboard into her lap.
Shoulda gone to bed a long time ago.
Nell tightened her hands into fists, threw her shoulders back, and stretched her aching spine. Her right shoulder was still sore from bumping the brick wall when Lenny Rodman brushed her aside in his flight to freedom. Though the shoulder was badly bruised and taking on a nasty purple and green coloration, she was sure it wasn’t seriously injured. Nell had experienced debilitating damage and knew the difference.
The apartment was still a sauna. Perspiration was stinging the corners of her eyes. She rubbed them and looked more closely at the computer screen. The website that had been slowly loading when she fell asleep was now up all the way. Dark Nor’easters. vis was the name of the site, and it seemed to be made up of notable unsolved crimes committed in northeastern states.
Awake again, even feeling somewhat refreshed, Nell went through her search routine, specifying deliberate clues, single victims (in number, not marital status), shootings, stabbings, bludgeonings, strangulations, indoors, outdoors, men, women, days, nights, in vehicles, urban, suburban, exurban settings.
She was astounded when the screen flickered and came up with more than a dozen shootings, nights, indoors, deliberate clues left by killer.
She specified New York City.
No problem.
It didn’t take her long to scan back year by year and find what she wanted. Four years ago a woman named Rachel Cohen had been discovered shot to death in her Village apartment. A red letter J had been drawn with red marking pen on her forehead.
Only two years ago a wealthy woman on the Upper East Side, Iris Selig, was discovered dead in the elevator to her penthouse suite, also shot to death. A red J was scrawled with her lipstick on the elevator mirror.
A further search of the victims list wasn’t productive. It was then Nell realized that when she’d fallen asleep she’d accidentally clicked on the “Hate Crimes” section of the website.
It was assumed then, as it had been now, that the two victims were killed because they were Jewish. Nell even managed to call up some old Village Voice and Times articles decrying the rise in hate crimes and anti- Semitism in the city, after the Iris Selig murder.
Nell didn’t think this changed anything. New York simply had a large Jewish population. In light of the later victims, there was still no consistent hate crime pattern. The killer seemed to be eclectic in his choices of victims.
Still, Selig and Cohen were Jewish names.
She bookmarked the website then returned to her more traditional data bases.
Nell was wide awake now.
The more pertinent question was…
She soon discovered that Selig and Cohen had served as forepersons on juries in New York criminal cases.
Hot damn!
Nell could hear her breath hissing as she worked her computer, wishing she had faster internet service.
But within half an hour she had the information 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
