Free Chill of Night by John Lutz

clean crime scene—typical of our guy.”
    Beam stared out the windshield of the parked car for a moment, then said, “Looper, you talk to Floyd again, then drive the unmarked up to Connecticut and check out his alibi. Nell and I are gonna go to the lamp emporium or whatever, where Bev worked, and talk to her boss and coworkers.”
    Looper opened the Lincoln’s right rear door and started to get out, then paused. “Anything I should know about Floyd?”
    â€œHe didn’t murder his wife, but he’s got a guilty conscience. You work him right, he’ll tell you the truth.”
    Beam watched Looper walk away; he appeared to be absently feeling his pockets for cigarettes.
    â€œHe’ll suck a cigarette before he goes back upstairs to talk with hubby,” Nell said. “It’s that way every day. He needs it to calm down.”
    â€œThat’s his business,” Beam said, “as long as it doesn’t kill him before something else does.”
    Or before this investigation’s finished, Nell thought.
    When the jittery Looper was out of sight, Beam opened the driver’s side door and started to climb out from behind the steering wheel. The intensifying morning heat lowered itself like a weight onto his back.
    â€œI thought we were going to the lamp emporium,” Nell said.
    Beam leaned farther down and looked across the car at her. “We are, but let’s walk. That was how Beverly Baker usually went back and forth to work. Let’s follow in her footsteps. Maybe, sometime or other, they took her past her killer.”
    Â 
    After leaving Beverly Baker’s building, Justice had strolled a few sunny blocks, then taken the Eighty-sixth Street entrance into the park. It was such a beautiful morning that people he didn’t know nodded to him and said hello. He returned their friendliness with his own. The latex gloves he’d used to be sure he wouldn’t leave fingerprints in Beverly Baker’s apartment were neatly folded in his pocket, turned inside out just in case some of her blood might have gotten on them. Blood particles could be so minute the human eye wouldn’t spot them, but a police laboratory might. He knew the police had tricks that were almost magic.
    As he strolled along sun-dappled paths, he replayed the Beverly Baker murder in detail— mind like a DVD .
    Good looking bitch, lots of leg, perched with her ass spread and her back arched the way women do when they’re concentrating hard while sitting before a mirror and putting on lipstick. She’d seen him in the mirror, got the message, didn’t want to believe it, been momentarily paralyzed by the realization of her impending death—as they all were. That moment was ice. It froze them.
    Those crystallized seconds belonged to him. In that brief and vulnerable time, they comprehended the reason for their death at his hands. Surely they read the papers, watched television news, overheard conversations. The NYPD had of course long ago informed the media. The entire city knew why people were being killed, former jury forepersons whose hands were bloody, who’d been instruments of injustice. He assured himself that in their final, frozen moments of life, they understood that his was the final judgment and the hand of justice, righting the wrongs they’d perpetrated, the imbalance and pain they’d been so instrumental in causing. Always he read the cataclysmic knowledge in their eyes, but so there would be no misunderstanding, as the light died in them, he whispered the religion and the word that carried his victims to the other side: Justice.
    They died knowing. He lived knowing. He was setting the universe right. On a day like this one, with the sun laughing through the high leaves and the birds telling tales, his mission was especially satisfying.
    He still had work to do, but it was good work. It was right work. Not nearly