LITMIR.BIZ

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      Floyd stood up and staggered backward. He swallowed the bile that rose bitter in his throat, then wiped his sleeve across his mouth and chin. He realized his mouth was slightly open, his lips rigid. He licked his lips with a dry tongue and pressed them together.

      Turning away from the horror, he made himself trudge back into the living room.

      Must be a dream. Has to be…

      He stood at the phone and slowly lifted the receiver.

      The voice of the 911 operator from the outside world made it all real.

      It wasn’t a dream; it was real. It would stay real.

      The buzzer sounded. Beam went to the intercom and called down for confirmation that Corey and Looper were downstairs, then buzzed the two detectives up.

      Not knowing quite what to expect, he stood with the apartment door open so they wouldn’t have to knock.

      A short, slender woman wearing dark slacks and a rumpled gray blazer emerged from the elevator. She had dishwater blond hair combed back in a convenient rather than flattering hairdo. Her eyes were dark, her chin defiant. Her shoes were black and sensible, with low heels, and she walked with a slouchy kind of determination, as if with a certain slow eagerness she might be heading toward a fight.

      She was followed by a tall, sallow man in a suit that didn’t fit his angular body. Beam thought it was a fairly expensive and well cut suit—it was the body that was the problem. Looper was built like a mannequin assembled from spare parts. He looked a little like an awkward Fred Astaire, or maybe that was because Beam knew his first name was Fred.

      They did the introductions. Both detectives looked Beam in the eye as they shook hands. He noticed that Nell Corey’s hair had dark roots. Looper was holding the murder files tucked beneath his left arm, thick brown folders, each fastened with cord over a metal clasp.

      “Want something to drink while we talk this over?” Beam asked.

      Looper declined.

      “Bottled water, if you’ve got some,” Nell said.

      Beam excused himself, got her a bottle of Zephyr Hills from the refrigerator, then returned to usher the two detectives into his den. One of them smelled strongly of peppermint—Looper, Beam thought. He wondered if the man was covering for a drinking habit.

      When they were seated, he saw how Looper, in the leather chair, glanced around to see if there were any ashtrays. Then he noticed the detective’s yellow-stained index and middle finger on his right hand. Not a drinker, a smoker. And if Beam was any judge, badly in need of a cigarette.

      Beam, who enjoyed an occasional cigar, started to open a drawer to get out an ashtray, then paused. “Mind if we smoke?” he asked Nell.

      “Tell you the truth, I do.”

      Looper shot her an annoyed look.

      Beam smiled and pushed the drawer closed. “Okay. We can save it for outside.”

      Looper leaned forward and laid the murder files on Beam’s desk. “Your copies,” he said. “We each have ours.”

      “You’ve studied them?” Beam asked.

      Both detectives nodded.

      “And?”

      Nell spoke up first. “Same gun, same letter J.”

      “An anti-Semite killer?” Beam asked.

      She surprised him. “I don’t think so. It’s too much of a stretch.”

      “I agree,” Beam said.

      She swallowed, nervous, as if about to take a plunge. “I was up late working my computer,” she said, “checking into various databases. There’s something stronger linking these victims, something that can’t be coincidental. At one time or other, they all served as jury forepersons in the city of New York.” She glanced at her partner. “I already filled Loop in on this.”

      “There doesn’t seem to be any other common denominator among the victims,” Looper said, coming to her defense. “Different parts of town, different occupations, different circles of friends and acquaintances, different sexes.”

      “There’s something the juries they presided over had in common, though,” Nell said. “In all the cases, the defendants were almost certainly guilty but got off.”

      “Were any of the prosecutors or defense attorneys the same?” Beam asked.

      “Nope,” said the blond woman with dark roots, now with a certain confidence. Beam was taking her seriously, buying into her theory.

      “Anybody Jewish in all this?”

      “Not so’s you’d notice,” Nell said. “What you’d expect in New York, a royal mix. And some of the trials were years apart. The most recent was last year, the one longest ago happened…” She leaned forward to pick up one of the files and refresh her memory.

      “Six years ago,” Looper said.

      Nell sat back and took a swig of Zephyr Hills.

      Beam leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. “So whaddya think?”

      “Serial killer, obviously,” Looper said. His hand went to his shirt pocket, then quickly withdrew. Smoker’s arm. “He doesn’t seem to have a hard-on about the defendants, though; it’s the juries that set him off, especially the jury forepersons.”

      “The jurors are the ones responsible for the defendants going free,” Nell pointed out. “And if you had to hang it on any one of them, it would be the foreperson.”

      “So it’s the system our killer doesn’t like,” Beam said.

      “You could say that,” Nell told him, “unless there’s a common thread we haven’t discovered yet.”

      “What about a common thread connecting the freed defendants?”

      Nell and Looper glanced at each other.

      Looper emitted a volley of hoarse coughs, raising a yellowed finger to implore Nell and Beam to be patient. Each time he coughed, the scent of peppermint wafted across the desk.

      Finally he stopped coughing, cleared his throat twice, and swallowed phlegm before trusting himself to speak. “The defendants: One wife killer; one gang member making his bones by shooting three people in a diner; one kidnapper-torturer who did a twenty-year-old NYU student.”

      “Female student?” Beam asked.

      “Yeah. The victims are three females and two males. Females are the dead wife and dead student. And of the three victims in the diner shooting, one was a woman.”

      “So by way of defendants who got lucky and walked,” Nell said, “we got a jealous husband killed his wife, a gangbanger trying to impress his peers, and a sex maniac who liked college girls. Not much in common among defendants.”

      “Except that they went free,” Beam said.

      “Not for the same reasons. The gangbanger had a phony alibi that couldn’t be disproved, the sex maniac hadn’t been sufficiently informed of his rights, the wife killer simply got off even though the evidence against him was overwhelming.”

      “So they all should have been convicted,” Beam said.

      Nell took another swig of bottled water. “Read the court transcripts and you’d have to say that.”

      Beam unlaced his fingers and sat forward, causing his swivel chair to squeak. “What we’re gonna do,” he said, “is pore over these murder files again—I haven’t had a chance to read them yet. Then we’ll revisit the crime scenes, talk again to witnesses, go over ground already covered, see if anybody’s memory can be jogged.” He looked at Looper. “You say it was the same gun used in all three murders, so what do we know about it?”

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