Chill of Night by John Lutz Read Free Book Online Page A

his computer was upgraded and brought into the present world of tech.
    By the time the kid was finished, Beam was patched into the NYPD system and had gone wireless so he could use his computer anywhere in the apartment, or—the computer kid had assured him—various places outdoors, or in certain restaurants and entire areas that were set up for wireless.
    â€œThat’s damned amazing,” Beam told the kid.
    â€œI don’t understand why anybody’d ever use a typewriter,” the kid replied. “Or how they ever got that complicated machinery to work at all.”
    â€œI don’t type, either,” Beam said.
    With a pitying shake of his head, the kid gathered up his bits and bytes and left. Beam watched him out and down the hall to the elevator.
    Beam closed the door and looked at his watch. Almost four o’clock, when da Vinci had told him by phone that detectives Nell Corey and Fred Looper were coming to the apartment to meet Beam to get acquainted and have a strategy session.
    Moving out to the middle of the living room, Beam looked around. It was a pleasant room with a hardwood floor, throw rugs, a comfortable overstuffed cream-colored sofa, a tan leather armchair, smaller, rose-colored upholstered chair, green marble-top coffee table, some oil paintings on the walls, bought more as decorative pieces than as art. Lani’s touch. For that reason, maybe, Beam didn’t want to settle down in the room with Corey and Looper.
    He used both hands to lift the rose-colored chair—Lani’s chair—and carried it down the hall and into his den.
    The chair didn’t go with the den’s decor, but that was okay. Three of the den’s walls were oak paneled, the fourth painted off-white and covered with framed photos or department commendations. A baseball trophy sat on a table with some other framed photos. Some of the photos were of Beam and Lani, sometimes with their son Bud, who’d played All American minor league ball in the Cincinnati farm system in Florida and been struck in the head by a pitched ball. He’d died the next day of massive subdural hematoma. Only nineteen years old, and his death had killed something in Beam and Lani, in their marriage. The pitcher who’d hit Bud, a retread player named Rowdy Logan, had also aimed for his head on the previous pitch, so it was a deliberate beaning. Logan had been demoted from the majors for similar headhunting, and this time charges were brought against him. Charges that were going nowhere. Murder on the baseball diamond was a difficult thing to prove.
    That was something Beam owed da Vinci. Da Vinci said he had connections in Florida and could help to actually prosecute Logan. As it turned out, that wasn’t necessary, as Logan was found a few days later full of barbiturates that had given him the courage to shoot himself in the head. The bullet had struck with the same effect that the ninety-mile-per-hour fastball had on young Bud Beam.
    Justice, delivered not by the legal system but by the killer himself. Beam’s faith in the system he served had been severely shaken. As had his faith in everything.
    Seven years ago. First Bud gone, now Lani.
    Beam placed the rose-colored chair at an angle facing his large mahogany desk. There was already a brown leather chair in a similar position at the other corner of the desk. Beam would have the two detectives sit in the chairs, facing him across the desk. They would talk. They would plan. They would take the first step in finding and stopping the maniac who was killing people in his city.
    At first, hesitant to take on the case, Beam now was beginning to feel the old eagerness take hold. He was on the job again. He was a cop. He was a hunter set to stalk his prey.
    Exactly what da Vinci wants.
    Â 
    â€œYou home, Bev?” Floyd Baker called.
    He stood just inside the apartment door, his golf club bag slung over his shoulder. Something about the place