Shadow Dancers (4 page)

“Check out Merwin.”

An angry stream of epithets sounded from somewhere out in the darkened apartment.

“What the hell’s he yapping about now?” Mooney fumed.

“Light’s keeping him up. He wants to go to sleep. You blame him?”

“Balls,” the voice intoned, low and sepulchral, from the area of the kitchen. “Balls.” It wafted across the living room and into the bedroom. The source of it was a raucous five-year-old mynah bird called Sanchez, a scruffy, garrulous black creature who resided in a tall, bell-shaped cage and appeared to thrive in a state of perpetual molt.

“Just listen to that fool,” Mooney grumbled.

“You teach him dirty words, he’ll say them for you,” Fritzi chastened him.

Mooney glared down at the tumbled mane of red hair spilling across the pillow. He sighed as though in defeat and snapped closed his pad.

“Just try and forget all this for a few hours,” Fritzi mumbled into her pillow.

“I try. Believe me, I try. Trouble’s Mulvaney. He won’t let me. Did you do this?’ ‘Did you do that?’ ‘Why haven’t you checked out so and so?’…” Mooney’s voice trailed off into smothered exasperation.

“You’re getting closer to these nutsos every day. Eventually one of them is bound to make a mistake. That’s when you’ll nab them both.”

“Yesterday I might’ve believed that. Today I’m as far from a solution as I was last March when I first started. Just when I figure I’ve got hold of something tangible, it all goes up in smoke. Tonight we pulled this kid out of a sewer. Now that’s outdoors. That’s not indoors. That’s never happened before. That’s a whole new wrinkle. That’s not a detached or semi-detached dwelling. But it sure looks like one of our two guys again. There was the usual sex stuff, and the naughty little boy scribblings on the walls. There were the bite marks on the body, too. That’s consistent. But this little girl was younger than any of the previous victims. Early twenties. The others run from the late twenties on up into the fifties and sometimes the sixties. You see, it’s like that. Consistent, but not consistent. I don’t know who I’m looking for anymore. One description has him medium height, dark hair, with a crooked smile. Another has him fair-haired and above average height, with a sweet baby face.”

“So you know you’ve got two different guys,” Fritzi mumbled sleepily.

“Sure. Classic copycat situation. That’s easy.” Mooney huffed. “The tough part is trying to tell the one from the other. I keep confusing them. I used to think I could tell the styles apart. Now I can’t anymore.”

Outside on the street below an ambulance whooped like a stricken creature, beating its way up into some troubled northern precinct.

“What these two guys do is probably ninety-five, ninety-six percent identical.” Mooney fretted. “But then there’s those two or three few percentage points of deviation where the copycat guy goes off and does his own little number.”

“You always do everything one hundred percent the same?” Fritzi asked drowsily. “Brush your teeth the same every morning? Sign your name the same?” Fritzi gathered the blankets up around her shoulders. “You know any horse that runs the same race twice?”

“Sure. They do all the time. Just check the P.P.‘s.”

“You think you can tell what a horse will do one day just from looking at his P.P.‘s? If that were true, how come you’re not a millionaire?”

Lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, Mooney grew indignant. “Well, you can damn well pretty much tell how a horse is gonna run if you’ve got his past performance charts in front of you.”

“P.P.‘s are just numbers. Weight of horse. Weight of jockey. Speed over a given distance. Where the horse finished last three times out. Numbers. Just numbers.” Mooney flung his hands up in despair. “How did we get into this? Weren’t we just talking homicide a minute ago?”

“Same thing. You’re giving me M.O.‘s and I say they’re just P. P.‘s. You need something more. For the full story, you need the IP’s.”

That brought the detective to an abrupt stop. “IP’s?”

“The Imponderables. The stuff you can’t describe with numbers. How does the horse feel? Is he rested? Does he hurt anywhere? Does he like his jockey? What’s his mental attitude? Don’t you think that goes into the equation too?”

“Okay. Okay. I get your point,” Mooney grumbled. “But how does all this apply to the matter at hand?”

“I’m coming to that.” Fritzi lay with a coyly angelic smile on her face. “All I’m asking you now is to acknowledge the fact that you have an incomplete picture with these eleven M.O.‘s because they don’t take into consideration the little normal variations in human behavior from one day to the next.”

“Granted. Okay? Granted.” Mooney had started to swell dangerously. “But that’s all I have to go on. I don’t have the luxury of sitting down with these two nut cases and asking them if they slept well last night and if everything is all perky and rosy with them today.”

“Right. That’s what separates the truly great handicapper from the merely good one. That’s what I call the leap of faith.”

“Good Christ,” Mooney fumed. He snapped off the light. “Now she’s into theology. Forget I asked you.”

“If you don’t care for ‘leap of faith,’” Fritzi continued, “call it hunch or educated guess.”

Mooney smoldered silently in the dark for a moment.

“Okay. So what’s your best educated guess? Who’s who? Which is which? Who’s the shadow and who’s the dancer? Tell me.”

“Well, just from what you’ve been reading me here, for as I can tell it goes something like this.” She flopped on her back and clasped her palms on her chest as though she were praying. “We re agreed we’ve got two guys. Right?”

“Agreed,” Mooney fumed.

“We’ve got two sets of descriptions. One is a darkhaired guy with a crooked smile. Medium height. Medium weight. We’ll call him ‘Blackie.’ The other is a fair-haired boy. Medium height and weight. We’ll call him ‘Whitey.’”

“Get on with it, will you, for Chrissake?”

Fritzi ignored the tirade and bore down harder on the puzzle. “We know Blackie and Whitey both prefer detached or semi-detached residences, although one of them is not entirely opposed to working out of doors, as we saw.”

“Keep going.”

“We know both of these boys like sex, because they both appear to make use of the ladies in that way. Both like to draw naughty pictures on the walls, scrawl little messages. But one of them,
only one of them,
adds numbers to the little pictures and messages. Oh, by the way, what about the handwriting?”

“We spoke to a couple of experts.”

“And?”

“One says it’s two different guys. The other’s not so sure.”

“That’s experts for you.”

Mooney sighed. “Keep going. Keep going.”

“Both work the early hours of the morning. Generally between two and six
A. M.
Both claim the knife as weapon of choice but occasionally will strangle their victims.”

“Keep going.”

“Finally, while sex appears to be a principle motive in both M.O.‘s, theft appears to play a role in just one.”

“That’s right.” Mooney said. “You got it all right. So what do we have so far?”

“So far, that’s only the P. P.‘s.”

“Okay. So what about these IP’s of yours? This ‘leap of faith’ thing? Which of these guys is which?”

She’d lapsed into a silence and for a moment he thought she’d fallen asleep. “You still there?” he asked.

“I’m here. I’m thinking.” Again she propped herself up on an elbow and peered at him through the dark. “Where we’ve got eyewitness descriptions of the guy, it appears it’s Blackie who uses both pictures and numbers. Whitey just does the pictures.”

“Okay. So what does that say to you?”

“That says to me that Blackie is the hardheaded pragmatist and Whitey is the daydreaming romantic. That says to me that Whitey is the guy who steals nothing. Only some love. Blackie is the entrepreneur. He grabs stuff. He’s in it for both fun and profit. How am I doing so far?”

“Okay. Okay,” he snapped impatiently. “Keep going.” For the first time since she’d started her disquisition, he appeared to be interested. “So of both of these nutsos, which, if you will, is the copycat and which the original?” Fritzi laughed lightly. “That’s easy. Just check the chronology in your notes.”

“You mean just because the first entry I’ve got fingers a dark-haired guy, he’s the chief architect?”

“Figures, doesn’t it? There’s no description of a blond type till you get down to your fifth or sixth M.O.”

“Sixth,” Mooney confirmed. “I’m afraid that’s a bit too easy, Fritzi. How do you know this hasn’t been going on long before we observed the similarities of the two M.O.‘s and started to track them? We’re still carrying unsolved homicides on the books that go back for years and are very similar in type to these. How do we know when they really started and which guy started it?”

“We don’t. All we can do is make that educated guess based on when your record-keeping started. But given what you have now, I’m willing to bet that Blackie is your original. He’s the guy who adds numbers to the dirty pictures and the guy who steals after he rapes. Whitey s got no interest in numbers or in trade. He’s the dreamer, as I said. The poet. Also, he’s passive. He’s a follower. Blackie is a trailblazer. He’d just as soon slit your throat as have a cup of tea with you. He’s got a plan to beat you every time. Take my word for it, Mooney. Blackie’s your Dancer; Whitey’s your Shadow.”

In the next moment, as though someone had thrown a switch, she’d flipped over on her stomach and was fast asleep.

Long after, Mooney still lay there in the dark, hands clasped behind his neck, thinking about what she’d said. You had to hand it to Fritzi, he thought, with a touch of professional resentment. She had a way of going at problems, a way of absorbing and processing information, then handing it back to you all wrapped up pretty in some condensed and highly ordered way that enabled you to see things there you’d never seen before. She had an unerring eye for sifting the valuable from a swamp of detail and chucking out the dross. She couldn’t care less for the old pro cops’ reverence for routine and logic. Fritzi was a true longshotter, and as any good handicap-per could tell you, over the long haul, longshot players lose. But if that was statistically correct, it had made little impression on Fritzi. In all of the years Mooney had known her, with all of her longshotting, buck for buck wagered, she was way ahead of the game.

From outside in the kitchen, another sharp volley of oaths rattled through the darkened apartment. They came in the clipped, half-swallowed locutions of a bird’s voice box. A stream of comic filth to keep the goblins of the night at bay.

HE ALWAYS EXPERIENCED HIS GREATEST
sense of elation when driving. The sensation of total freedom only occurred for him behind the wheel of a car. At such times a tremendous weight of care lifted from him. He surrendered to a terrifying buoyancy, letting the car take him wherever it chose.

With windows wide open (even in the coldest weather) and the tape deck turned up to maximum volume, he listened to motets and Gregorian chants, alternating with mind-numbing bouts of heavy-metal rock with lyrics spouting easy blasphemies and conjuring the Devil. The one assured him of the indulgence of a kind and loving God; the other, of the delectable enticements of pure abandon.

When off on these jaunts he liked to play a game. It was a sort of fortune-telling game — divination with license-plate numbers. Simply put, he would add up numbers on the plates of cars and watch for patterns to emerge. There were numbers that were good luck and others that were inauspicious. Any combination of numbers adding up to 9, 13, 18, or 22, or those numbers themselves, he considered propitious. Those combinations adding up to 8, 10, or 12 were bad. Sixteen was the most ominous of all. When he saw a frequently repeated series of plates with any combination of 432 or 576, or 112 or 220, he knew that all things were right with the world. The portents were good. The wind was at his tail.

Double numbers were especially propitious … 11, 33, 99. But in his curious system of divination, 22 was the best you could get. He well knew that in the Sacred Tree there were ten circles of the Sephiroth, joining 22 lines. Twenty-two was the most sacred number of all. There were 22 cards of Tarot. He was born on the 22nd day of the 9th month, and the difference between the number of the day and the number of the month was 13.

On the other hand, 666, even though it added up to the benevolent 18, was also the number of the Beast in Revelation, and that, under certain circumstances, could be terrifying.

At first, when the game would commence, the numbers would be random, with no particular order. Just lots of numbers banging about before his eyes. He’d have to add them quickly (hard for him because he didn’t add numbers well). For the most part, no discernible pattern would emerge. From the start, the pace of it was frantic, like entering into some barely contained madness, the numbers racketing wildly about inside his head. At that point, it would become compulsive and nonselective. He would have to add every group of numbers that came within his purview — not only license plates, but route numbers, numbers glimpsed on passing buildings, and those appearing on roadside billboards. It became a captivity from which he could not escape. A kind of panic commenced. Bombarded with unending numbers, more and more numbers crammed into an ever-decreasing space, his brain would decline to program any more. Yet, he’d be unable to stop. The numbers would simply lunge at him and he would have to add them. It went on and on like that for miles, until mental stupefaction and simple exhaustion brought it to a halt.

At that point, as surely as if a switch were flicked, something inside him would turn off and he would enter a different, a higher plane of consciousness … a place of utter calm. The numbers would still be there, but slowed exquisitely, like tiny molecules falling through heavy liquid, and he was suddenly aware of some preternaturally heightened sense within himself. The sensation was that of the keenest excitation, not entirely unlike sex.

In the cascade of numbers falling slowly before his eyes he could see patterns and combinations repeating themselves with startling frequency. But not only this: he could take these sequences and project them out into near infinity. There were, of course, the simple ones like 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 — demonstrating the power of 2; then mindbendingly complex ones like 1, 1, 2, 5, 14, 38, 120, 353 — representing the number of different ways of folding ever-longer strips of postage stamps. There were patterns that consisted of numbers in which each was the sum of the two previous numbers, such as 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55. And more complex variations based on the three, or sometimes four, previous numbers. There were series in which one had to double the last term and then add the second to last, and there were beautifully simple prime numbers that were one less than a power of 2, such as 3, 7, 31, etc.