His luck held. A woman was there, huddled tightly beneath a white porcelain washbasin. It was somewhat quieter in the enclosure, and the wind was partially blocked.
The woman was in her fifties, overweight, and frightened as hell. Through a curtain of rain-plastered hair, she studied Daniel with wide blue eyes. Had those eyes seen what happened outside in the wreckage?
Daniel smiled. “I killed your husband.”
The woman said nothing. Didn’t even change expression. In shock, Daniel decided. His fault? Or the hurricane’s?
He left her and made his way to what used to be the kitchen, rooted through the wreckage until he located the right cabinet and found the drawer where the knives were kept. He chose the largest one, testing the blade’s edge with his finger to make sure it was sharp.
He returned to the makeshift shelter and found that the woman hadn’t moved. He squatted down next to her and began to cut away her clothes with the knife. She put up no resistance. The maelstrom of storm and events had stolen any sense of reality. She was having a bad dream that would eventually end. This man was here to save her; he was a doctor, cutting away her clothes so he could treat her injuries. There was no other explanation. None that she wanted to explore, anyway.
She couldn’t hear him over the wind, but could see that he was laughing. He twisted her around so she was on her stomach and skillfully sliced the tendons behind her knees. She wasn’t going anywhere.
Then he began having fun.
An hour later, the wind had died down. At least it was no longer yowling. It was still coming out of the east, and was hard enough to drive curtains of rain when it gusted.
Daniel left the woman and found in the house’s wreckage what used to be a bedroom. It was easy to locate some of the husband’s clothes.
He stood naked in the searing rain for a while and let it wash most of the woman’s blood from him. Then he put on the farmer’s clothes. The guy had been well over six feet, so Daniel had to roll up the pants cuffs. The short-sleeved shirts were a little baggy but fit okay. The orange jumpsuit he wadded and shoved into what was left of a dresser drawer.
These people couldn’t have lived in this isolated ranch house or farmhouse or whatever it was without some kind of transportation. He walked the perimeter of the house and saw what might have once been a garage. There was a vehicle near it, lying on its side.
Daniel walked over and saw that the wind-tossed vehicle was an old Dodge pickup truck. He considered trying to shove it upright, but he found that he couldn’t budge it.
That was when he noticed chrome grillwork peeking out from under the wreckage of the garage. He walked over and saw that it was the front end of a late-model Ford SUV. Suffused with a new strength, he began throwing wreckage this way and that, digging the vehicle out.
When he was finished, and the SUV had a path out to where the gravel driveway was clear, he went to the dead man and found keys in his pocket. One of them was a car key. Good. That meant there’d be no need to hot- wire the ignition.
He then pulled a wallet from the corpse’s pants pocket. Eighty-seven dollars.
Daniel smiled. He rummaged through the wallet for more, but there was none. He did discover that he’d killed Flora and Nathan Amberson. Nice to have met you folks.
He returned to the SUV, climbed in, and inserted the key in the ignition switch.
The vehicle started on the first try. Daniel studied the dashboard. Half a tank of gas. Good enough.
He returned to the woman and dragged her out so she lay on a flattened and shattered window. Then he set to work beating her body with a length of two-by-four from the house’s studwork. When he was finished, he threw some of the house’s wreckage over her.
Daniel didn’t like it, but he left her with her breasts still attached.
He carried his two-by-four to the husband and beat him in similar fashion. It would take at least a while for the bodies to be found, and longer before they’d be identified as murder victims rather than victims of the hurricane or one of its tornados that had destroyed their home.
Meanwhile, Daniel Danielle would be driving.
He poked around the wreckage for a few more minutes, looking for anything useful. There was an old shotgun, but it wasn’t loaded, and Daniel didn’t have time to search for ammunition, so he left it.
He considered siphoning gas from the overturned pickup truck’s tank, but found that almost all of it had run out.
Regretting again that he had to leave the woman with her breasts, he got in the four-wheel-drive SUV and maneuvered it onto the long driveway, then to the road that was cluttered with debris. He headed west. He liked trailing the worst of the weather. Its violence helped to divert attention from his violence.
As he drove, his clothes dried and his heartbeat slowed. If he could make it to Interstate 75 and get south to the heavy population around Fort Myers, he could lie low someplace while time passed. Daniel was resourceful; he’d think of something. Right now, everyone was concerned with what the hurricane was leaving in its wake. If he was a greater danger, the hurricane was a wider one. He was going to be all right. Being captured now wasn’t part of his destiny. How else had he been able to escape?
The world held more for him. He was special. If that weren’t so, he’d be lying back there with those dead cops. He wouldn’t have found Nathan and Flora.
Flora…
He drove on, trailing the hurricane-like something spawned by its dark winds.
He let himself relax as much as he dared, thinking about Flora Amberson, how she’d tried to become mentally detached, waiting and praying for it to be over. But he’d seen that trick too often and knew how to deny Flora that final escape, how to delay it. How much longer had that hour they shared seemed to her than to him?
Somebody in the SUV laughed. Must have been the driver.
7
New York City, the present
“Y ou sure you need all that mentholated goop under your nose?” Sal Vitali asked his partner, Harold Mishkin.
Sal and Harold worked for Quinn, but they’d been partners in the NYPD. That partnership more or less continued, as Quinn usually used them as a team. Harold had always smeared mentholated cream on his brushy, graying mustache so the fumes would keep his head clear and his stomach from getting upset by the various odors of homicide scenes.
But this wasn’t actually a homicide scene. Macy Collins had been murdered and butchered in the park.
“The killer only spent a short time here after he killed her,” Sal reminded his partner. He knew Mishkin had a delicate constitution, and over the years he’d become protective of him, often in sly and subtle ways. At the same time, Harold could get on Sal’s nerves.
No, that wasn’t fair. Harold could drive Sal crazy.
“Place still smells bad,” Harold said. “Blood and death smell the same. The odor hangs around.”
Sal thought maybe Harold had something there. He didn’t much like the air in the stifling apartment himself.
They were a Mutt and Jeff team, Harold being average height but a beanpole, and with the bush of a mustache that seemed large enough that it bent him slightly forward. Sal was short, stocky, and animated. He waved his arms around a lot when he spoke. Harold was in most matters oversensitive-especially in regard to his stomach, which was delicate enough that he couldn’t stay long at violent crime scenes. Sal pretty much took things as they came. Harold spoke softly, while Sal had a voice like gravel rolling around inside a bucket.
The CSU techs were gone. Since this wasn’t the actual crime scene there was a limit to what they could achieve. They had pretty much left things as they’d found them, only with smudges here and there from fingerprint
