Weaver was almost certainly going to be at Q&A for a while. The killer fingered the cigarettes and lighter in his pocket. Thought about the knife taped to his leg.

Weaver could wait. This other woman, gray haired and obviously quite old, interested him. He was sure he’d seen her before, but the moving cloud shadows, the gray drizzle, hampered his view.

As the old woman left Q&A she turned to her left, away from the killer. He yanked his collar up higher, but it didn’t help much.

He decided to give Weaver another day to live, so he might satisfy his curiosity about the old woman.

Where had he seen her before?

Then he had it.

The way she tilted her head to the side when she walked, as if she were a bird using her near eye to search for worms. The way she held her arms in tight to her body. A defensive stance.

Something about her reminded the killer of one of his victims at the Fairchild Hotel. Which one, though? He trudged after the woman, fastening the top button of his light raincoat.

It would come to him.

Wait! There was Weaver. She’d come out of Q&A’s offices and turned left. It took the killer only a few seconds to realize Weaver was following the old woman who’d just exited Q&A.

Then he realized that an extraordinary piece of luck had come his way. Weaver, saved once by her illicit coupling with a cop, was now being practically handed to him. Two victims would serve his purpose nicely, especially if one was an old woman related to one of the Fairchild Hotel victims. That would further confound Quinn.

If it weren’t for the drizzle that had become a mist, Weaver would surely have seen or sensed him approaching from behind.

But he was sure she hadn’t.

He fell back, plotted, anticipated, enjoyed.

At Broadway, the old woman stopped and stood in a shop doorway.

Then Weaver surprised the killer. As he watched, she approached the woman and the two of them stood talking for a few minutes beneath the shop’s awning, where it was relatively dry.

So she wasn’t simply tailing the old woman; she was protecting her. A mission Quinn had no doubt assigned to her.

Weaver stepped out into the mist and waved both arms as if attempting to fly, trying to hail a cab. The killer smiled. On a rainy day in New York, cabs seemed to morph into objects unlike vehicles.

As soon as the two women gave up, they would take a subway. Crowded as the subways would be, he could easily follow them without being observed.

Then, miraculously, the laws of probability turned upside down, and the unthinkable occurred before the killer’s eyes. A cab veered from the flow of traffic toward the curb and braked to a halt directly in front of Weaver. Weaver held the door open for the old woman, then scooted into the back of the car with her.

Watching the cab drive away, the killer ran out into the street, waving for another cab. One honked its horn at him and then almost ran him down. He jumped back onto the sidewalk, dragging one foot. Water sloshed into his shoe.

The killer simply wouldn’t accept this. He wouldn’t!

He trudged over and stood beneath the shop awning where the two women had stood. The mist still reached him. He bitterly jammed his fists deep into his pockets. This was so like when he was a child, and nothing he did was right. He was an abomination. An unexpected and unwanted kind of horrible growth that had to be cut out of his mother’s stomach.

Then he’d done something right.

Playing the dumbstruck, grieving child had been easy. The police had picked up Bill Phoenix and found the knife in his car, stained with the blood of Dwayne’s father and Maude. Dwayne didn’t have to make up much to describe details of Maude and Bill’s secret affair.

Bill Phoenix knew he didn’t have a chance, and Florida was a state that executed killers. He tried to evade the police in his white pool-service van, but didn’t get far. He was apprehended in a motel parking lot.

Dwayne had inherited a multimillion-dollar trust that became his at the age of twenty-five. He’d established accounts under different identities and invested wisely, most often in art that he obtained surreptitiously through straw parties and then kept to and for himself. Much of the rest of his wealth was with various money management firms that he drew on from time to time. There was no reason anyone else should know his true wealth.

For years after his father’s and Maude’s deaths, he would dream about them writhing in the flames of hell. They would be aflame themselves, perhaps even clutching each other in their hopeless desperation. Screaming and dancing in their wild and terrible knowledge. Paying for each and every sin.

These were not nightmares.

Possibly all that money had spoiled the killer. That and his previous success and notoriety as D.O.A. By now, he was used to obtaining whatever he wanted. And he wanted Nancy Weaver.

The mist continued to send persistent trickles beneath his upturned collar and down the back of his neck. He ignored it. Head bowed, he made his way toward a subway stop, where it would be crowded but dry. Where he was sure luck would swing his way.

Nancy Weaver. He knew where she lived.

No matter how long he had to wait for her, he would wait. If she brought the uniformed cop home with her again, or another sexual partner, he would wait. He smiled his tight smile.

That Weaver didn’t know he was waiting was immaterial. Soon she would belong to him.

So would the perfect woman who had no way of knowing his intention. She would someday become his most prized possession.

Women like Nancy Weaver were steps to the ultimate.

35

Nancy Weaver was tired of being wet. After dropping Ida Tucker at the morgue, and offering to go in with her and lend support, Weaver had stayed in the cab and given the driver her address and the nearest cross street. Until the cab pulled away from the curb, she watched Ida Tucker, moving like a much younger woman in her high heels, pick her way through pedestrians and umbrellas. Then Weaver slumped with the side of her head against the window, and through half-closed eyes watched traffic joust with traffic.

It took Weaver’s cab almost half an hour to reach the intersection near her apartment. Close enough. The short walk to her building she made in almost a dash.

So relieved was she to be almost home and dry, that she didn’t notice the nearby figure step silently from the shadows. His timing was exquisite. As Weaver pulled the heavy door open and moved inside to the foyer, he matched her step for step, all the time raising his long-bladed knife to her throat.

He was up against her before she knew it. She felt the knife point jab at the side of her neck, near the carotid artery, and smelled and felt the warmth of his breath, the fetid wetness of his long raincoat. The coat was black, and held the odors of the street: exhaust fumes, and the cloying garbage scents of whatever was in the pavement and set free by the rain. He had brought the night in with him.

The knife blade never wavering, he guided her up the stairs and along the hall. No one came around a corner, or happened to open their door and see them.

As they entered her apartment she heard him kick the door shut behind them.

The lights were off, and her assailant wanted to keep them that way. With the blinds open as they were, inside light would create quite a show for anyone down in the street who happened to look up, or for someone in one of the buildings across the street.

“We’re walking to your bedroom,” he said, pressing harder with the knife. The length of his body was tight against hers. She had no choice but to move forward. To lead the way. She knew that once he got her in the bedroom and down, she was lost.