“Cause of death, a bullet to the brain, thirty-eight caliber. This bullet doesn’t match the others.”
“Shit!” Looper said. “He’s switched guns.”
“I’m sure he’s trying to help us out, right, Helen?” Da Vinci slumped down in his chair and stared at nothing on his desk.
No one said anything. The silence took on weight.
After a while, da Vinci said again, “He’s smarter than the cops trying to chase him down.”
“He’ll screw up,” Nell said. “We’ll be there.”
“Then go there,” da Vinci said dejectedly. “Find there. Go.”
Beam nodded toward the door, then led his detective team from the office.
Behind them, Helen said, “Andy.”
67
It was amazing how easy they were with each other now that the dam was broken. Nola enjoyed Beam’s slow and attentive lovemaking, and the guilt he felt from being with a woman other than Lani had fled his mind.
Not that Lani didn’t intrude in his dreams sometimes, as Harry must do in Nola’s dreams. But Beam and Nola both understood that every day, when they were awake and alive and together, was precious.
Finally, for both of them, the present outweighed the past.
They lay side by side in Nola’s bed, listening to New York slowing down outside the window. The scent of their lovemaking was still in the air despite the rose sachet Nola had dangling from the corner of her dresser mirror. Beam, who had always associated roses with funerals and death, now associated them with love and sex.
He had never talked much with Lani about the Job, but he did discuss his work with Nola. Especially the Justice Killer investigation. Part of it, he knew, was because he wanted her to better understand what he did for a living, a calling, so she might understand the symbiotic relationship between cop and snitch. Beam and Harry.
And now, Beam and Harry’s wife.
But Nola was also part of the case. The Justice Killer had made her that, had used her antique shop, Nola herself, to divert the investigation and taunt Beam.
Nola smiled over at him and ran a fingertip down the ridge of his nose. “What are you thinking, Beam?”
“About what Helen the profiler said, that the killer taunts me because secretly, even to himself, he yearns to be caught. And the more he taunts, the closer we are to finding him.”
Nola said, after a while, “Makes a crazy kind of sense.”
A fly had gotten into the room. It buzzed the bed, then began flinging itself repeatedly against the nearby window-pane. They watched it.
“Frustration,” Nola said.
“The NYPD with wings.”
“I didn’t mean the police. I meant the Justice Killer. He wants to kill, he wants to be stopped, he wants to be anonymous, he wants to be famous. He can’t get enough of any of it. It must be making his heart beat faster and faster.”
“That’s more or less how Helen sees it.”
“And you seem to be relying more and more on Helen.”
“Because da Vinci is.”
“Why?”
“He’s frustrated, too,” Beam said. “Like that fly and the rest of us only more so.”
“Maybe he’s afraid the killer will stop taunting and come after one of you.”
“Helen said it isn’t likely. We’re his reason for being. Only she has a French phrase for it.”
“Raison d’etre,” Nola said.
“Very impressive.” Beam wasn’t kidding. “She says we symbolize the system he’s acting out against, so he wants to keep us alive.”
“As symbols.”
“Yeah.”
“There are other symbols, like Adelaide Starr.”
“The killer wants her alive, too” Beam said. “She’s practically become his biggest asset. Helen says Adelaide’s adding to the killer’s celebrity and feeding his delusions. Besides, she’s so cute, who could kill her?”
“Helen could be wrong about all that symbolism and its value to the killer,” Nola said, “in whatever language.”
“Da Vinci doesn’t think so. Sometimes he says he does, but he doesn’t. Not really. She’s having more and more of an influence on him.”
“You think they might be in love?”
“Might,” Beam said.
Beam had lunch the next day with Cassie at a recently opened restaurant called Mambo, near the vast concrete and marble indoor park in the financial district. There were a lot of new businesses and new construction in this part of town, the city still coming back strong from the 9-11 horror. New York, the city that never sleeps and never surrenders. The city of scars with yet another.
Artificial potted palms flanked the restaurant’s canopied entrance. It had a dance motif, life-size silhouetted figures on the walls doing what looked to Beam more like tango than mambo. There were more potted palms inside, lots of ferns, and soft background music that sounded like samba.
The food couldn’t make up its mind what it was, either, though the menu was in Spanish. It wasn’t bad, just not as good as one of Cassie’s homemade dinners. And who was Beam to assume that Irish potatoes weren’t eaten south of the border?
“Been a while since we’ve seen each other,” said Beam’s sister.
“As you might guess, I’ve been busy into the evenings.” With Nola. Missing Cassie’s cooking so I could be with Nola. Twisting back and forth between man’s two essentials: food and women. Beam knew that if Cassie or Nola could somehow know the thought had entered his mind, they might seriously injure him.
“Nola,” Cassie said, pausing before taking a bite of something supposedly Latin.
Beam actually felt himself blush. He’d forgotten how preternaturally insightful Cassie could be. From the time they were children, she’d occasionally astounded him.
“She’s forgiven me,” he said.
“Wonderful,” Cassie said, inserting food in her mouth and smiling simultaneously. She’d said it as if she knew everything Nola’s forgiveness entailed, and she probably did know.
“How’s the investigation going?” she asked. Seeing that Beam was surprised by the abrupt question, she added, “I was sure you wanted to change the subject.”
He laughed. “You should play poker for a living.”
“It would bore me.”
He brought her up to date on the hunt for the Justice Killer. As he talked, her expression changed from intensely interested to concerned.
“So Looper thinks the killer might be a woman,” she said. “He didn’t strike me as such an independent thinker.”
“He’s real independent on that one,” Beam said. “Nobody agrees with him.”
“You don’t think it’s possible the killer’s a woman?”
“Possible. Sure. In the way that just about anything’s possible. But what we know about serial killers suggests it’s highly unlikely. Which camp are you in?”
“Not Looper’s,” Cassie said. “I don’t see the Justice Killer as female.”
“It’s nice to have my opinions confirmed,” Beam said.
“Shored up, anyway,” Cassie said.
Beam recalled how she’d almost always won every game she played as a kid. How she consistently beat the other kids at guessing where someone would move a checker, which sweaty little clenched fist held the coin, which
