Cold Blue Midnight Read online

  Jill didn't open the envelope until she was in her car.

  There was a handwritten note in the middle of the elegant blue page:

  ***

  I hope you're happy, you bitch. You'll pay for what you did to my son, I promise you.

  Evelyn Daye Tappley.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  21 October

  His ass was tired. But then, when Rick Corday pulled a surveillance job, his ass was always tired. He lifted his right cheek now and scratched. It was numb. He'd been sitting too long.

  He looked at the array of stuff he always took with him when he pulled surveillance. Wrigley's Spearmint gum. Life Savers peppermints. Johnson & Johnson Dental Floss. A penknife for cleaning his fingernails. A copy of the new Guys! Guys! Guys!.

  His car phone rang. 'Uh-huh?' he said after picking it up.

  'It's me. Adam.'

  'She's still in there. Saw a couple of people carrying stuff in and out. She must have a session.'

  'I have to go to New York.'

  Corday didn't say anything.

  'Are you still there?'

  'What's this New York crap?'

  'You seem to forget who I used to work for.'

  'So that means New York?'

  'I have to make a little correction on a job I did awhile back. Somebody else connected with the case.'

  You might think, from some of the language, that Rick and Adam were cops. They weren't. Rick was a former employee of a large investigative agency here in Chicago, while Adam was a former Los Angeles police detective. One of the things they had in common was that they killed people. Sometimes for fun. Sometimes for profit. Rick always preferred the former.

  'Nothing's going to happen.'

  'Right.'

  'I told you, Rick. I'm really trying to change.'

  'So far I haven't noticed. I mean, you were pretty drunk when you got home the other night. And pretty late.'

  'Perfectly innocent. Hit a few bars was all.'

  'Right.'

  'When we wrap this upwith Jill, I meanhow about we take a vacation?'

  'Just you and me and one of your new friends, huh?'

  'There's no sense talking to you when you're in this kind of mood.'

  'This New York thing pisses me off.'

  'I'll be back in a week. Just keep watching Jill. But don't do anything till I get back, all right?'

  'Yessir, your highness.'

  'You can really be hard to take sometimes, Rick, you know that?'

  'And you can't?'

  'I'll call you from New York.'

  'Right,' Rick said. And broke the connection.

  The sonofabitch, Rick thought. The unfaithful sonofabitch.

  CHAPTER 2

  24 October

  He was there again on Tuesday, the man in the blue Volvo. As usual, he spent his time pretending to read a magazine. Every few minutes, however, he'd look across the street at the small two-story building that was both Jill's work studio and her apartment.

  This was the fourth day in two weeks he'd been here, and this time Jill was ready for him.

  Grabbing her 35mm Nikon with the telephoto lens, she snapped a couple of shots, then walked quickly to the back of the apartment and went down the stairs leading to the alley. She couldn't see his license plates from her window.

  The smoky smell of October made her nostalgic for her girlhood. Hallowe'en pumpkins to carve. Costumes to try onshe'd always wanted to be Cinderella. And stories to whisper excitedly among the other kids about which neighbors were secretly monsters and had dungeons instead of basementsdungeons in which evil creatures of every kind imaginable lurked.

  Now Jill was about to deal with a real monster.

  The Lake View East area of Chicago was, as always, getting a partial face-lift. Lake View dated back to the last century and today its homes and buildings replicated perfectly a charming and more leisurely era. The city planned to keep it that way, too. Today a crew was painting the benches in a small park area a merry green color.

  At two in the afternoon, the street was crowded. A lot of artisans had moved in lately, combining living space with working space, so traffic was now more intense. Many of the small businesses used awnings as decoration and to lessen the hot Indian-summer sunlight. The street looked tidy and smart.

  The blue Volvo was still there.

  Jill walked half a block down the street away from the blue car then turned suddenly and started snapping pictures of it.

  She took twenty shots in all, the long-distance lens allowing her to get several clear profiles of the man as he stared at her building, and even the trunk sticker that gave the name of the dealer who'd sold the man the car. She still couldn't get the license number because of the car parked behind it.

  The air smelled of gasoline and cigarette smoke and heat. She sneezed. She had terrible allergies.

  The man surprised her by suddenly starting his car and driving away.

  She took a few more snaps of him as he drove off.

  She worried that maybe he'd spotted herbut no, that was unlikely. From where he'd sat, seeing her emerge from the alley was virtually impossible. And her camera position had been completely out of his sight.

  Satisfied that she'd gotten everything she'd neededmuch more, in factshe went back inside and got to work.

  ***

  Jill had souped her first photographs while she'd been on the staff of her high-school paper in Springfield. She had never gotten over the seeming magic of it all.

  You had developing tank and printing frame and printing paper, you had printing trays and developer and stop bath and fixer, you had film clips and printing tongs and safelightnothing remarkable about any of these elements when you looked at them individually. In fact, they were all disappointingly mundane.

  But if you knew how to use them properly, if you became a skilled technician in the holy gloom of the darkroom, then you truly became a wizard because you could reproduce life as you saw it… and sometimes you could even enhance life and its dramatic effects, as she'd done from the first time she'd ever seen an Edward Steichen black and white photo. The great photographer had died in 1973, but his influence and style lived on in Jill and a thousand other Jills around the world.

  She went right to work on the photos of the man and the blue Volvo. All the sights, smells and tiny noises of the developing process buoyed her.

  She would find out who the man was and what he wanted, and then she would deal with him appropriately.

  When everything was under way, and it was safe to make her call, she stepped outside the darkroom and lifted the receiver on the wall phone. The darkroom was in the rear of the first floor. At the front of the large ground floor was the studio itself. Lights, tripods, cables and props left over from yesterday's shoot littered the floor. She'd done stills for the Down's Syndrome Society, a freebie because she made a very good living and wanted to give something back. The lady from the Society had brought in six children suffering from the condition and each one of them had broken Jill's heart. She turned every photograph into a masterpiece of compassion. This was the kind of work she loved, but in order to do itat least for nowshe also had to shoot portraits of arrogant business leaders, pompous politicians and strutting jocks. Having an original Jill Coffey portrait of yourself was something devoutly to be desired in the Chicago area.

  She thought of the old brick convent she wanted to shoot someday soon. It was kind of an old nuns' graveyard, all these ancient, wrinkled, honorable women pushed away even by their own church, and utterly forgotten. Jill wished to capture their sorrow and their isolation. She needed a three-day shoot to do it properly. She also needed a big-money project that would finance her three-day shoot.

  'Kate?'

  'Changed your mind about dinner tonight, eh? I knew you would.'

  Jill hadn't had to identify herself. Best friends didn't need to trifle with such formalities.

  'He was here again today,' Jill said.
/>   'The guy in the blue Volvo?'

  'Uh-huh.'

  'Remember that football player I used to go out with?'

  Jill laughed. 'The one who thought Burt Reynolds should try his hand at Shakespeare? What was that title you came up with? ''Smokey and King Lear Go To London"?'

  'Well, cultured he wasn't but what he was, was one mean psycho after he'd had a couple of drinks. Maybe I should call him up and have him give you a hand. Two drinks would be all it'd take.'

  'He's probably a reporter.'

  'Whothe creep in the blue Volvo?'

  'Sure, from one of those TV tabloids. Remember three years ago?'

  Kate might have forgotten already, but Jill certainly hadn't. One day as she'd been leaving an office building in the Loop, she'd noticed a short blond man with a slight limp. Then she started noticing him again and again over the next few days. Everywhere that Jill went, so went the short blond man with the slight limp.

  Only after four days of this, and three useless calls to the police, was Jill able to find out who the man was and what he was all about.

  She'd been in Neiman-Marcus and suddenly couldn't deal with him trailing her any longer.

  Right there in the middle of the store, with ever so many disapproving matrons looking on, Jill had confronted the man and asked him exactly what the hell he thought he was doing.

  A TV tabloid reporter. That was who he was. That was what he was doing.

  His syndicated show was doing a piece on My Husband the Serial Killer, about three wives who'd been married to multiple murderers and how they'd coped with the aftermath of their husbands' trials, and their own public shame.

  Jill had refused to cooperate, of course. But that had not mattered.

  One sunny April morning, as she was sipping her first cup of coffee in her tiny breakfast nook and listening to all the spring-sweet birds, she saw her own image on the 11-inch black-and-white TV set she kept on the kitchen counter.

  'Did you know that prominent Chicago photographer Jill Coffey was actually the wife of notorious serial killer Peter Tappley? How do wives of serial killers cope with their lives after their husbands have been put to death?' (Here Jill's photo was joined with the images of two other women.) 'Find out tonight when Hard Facts presents My Husband the Serial Killer.'

  They hadn't needed her cooperation.

  They'd just gone to a few old friendsand a few old enemiesand gotten most of what they needed.

  And what they couldn't get from those sources, they'd simply made up.

  The weeks following the Hard Facts story had been miserable for Jill. While many within the Chicago advertising community had known about her former marriage to Evelyn Tappley's son, it was rarely mentioned. Her talent and her general good nature had made her a lot of friends and nobody wanted to see her suffer for something over which she had had no control.

  Peter had killed those women, not Jill.

  But for the three months following the Hard Facts story, Jill had experienced her first taste of notorietyand had hated it. The cynical and knowing gaze, the quick smirk, the whispersshe'd been treated to them all and had felt a curious shame, as if this was just the kind of treatment she deserved.

  So this time she was going to stop it before it started.

  This time she was going to find out which trashy TV show or newspaper the man in the blue Volvo worked for, and she was going to get an injunction.

  Surely a judge would be sympathetic once she told him what had happened following the Hard Facts story.

  Peter was now six years dead, and Jill wanted him to stay dead.

  'You remember when you hired that private detective?' she said to Kate.

  'Marcy?'

  'That's right,' Jill said. 'Marcy. What's her last name?'

  'Marcy Browne. With an "e" on the end. Why?'

  'I'm going to have her check out this guy in the blue Volvo.'

  'What about the police?'

  'First of all, what am I going to tell them? That there's a man who sits in a blue Volvo on a very busy street and he irritates me? And second of all, I don't want anything official to happen. Official means the press will get involved because they'll hear about it somehow. I just want Marcy to find out who the guy works for and then I'll hire a lawyer and threaten some kind of legal action. If an injunction doesn't work, then I'll threaten a lawsuit. I don't want to go through it again, Kate. I really don't.'

  'God, I don't blame you. I just hope Marcy can do something.'

  'Well, she can find out who he is if nothing else.'

  'You sure you don't want to have Chinese tonight?'

  'Maybe tomorrow night. Anyway, what happened to The Hunk?'

  Kate laughed. 'He's doing just fine, thank you.' Kate had been the most famous runway model to ever come from Chicago, glamorous, beautiful and a resolute heartbreaker. She changed men frequently.

  Jill's phone signaled a call waiting. Convenient as it was, call waiting could also be a royal pain in the butt. Jill and Kate always joked that one day one of them would be shouting frantically, 'And the killer is' But then call waiting would interrupt them and the identity of the killer would remain forever unknown.

  'I'll be right back,' Jill promised, and she depressed the phone button.

  A male voice said, 'Jill? It's me, Eric.'

  'Hi.'

  'You sound as enthused as always.'

  'Eric, we just don't have anything to say to each other anymore. I wish you could try to understand that.'

  She hated the whiny note in her voice but she was getting exasperated with the man. When she'd come back to Chicago following the execution, she'd had little luck in establishing a freelance business. Eric Brooks had just left one of the big ad agencies to start his own, and he needed money. She gave him her modest inheritance and together they formed a partnership. Within a year, Brooks-Coffey was one of the hottest shops in the Midwest. Eric was creative, bold and relentless. He was also egocentric, dishonest and so driven to sexual conquest that Jill sometimes wondered if he weren't insecure about his masculinity. After three years, they'd parted company. She'd made enough money on the partnership to set up her own photography studio. But Eric still called every few months, always trying to sound as if they were old friends who just couldn't wait to be together again. That might be Eric's feeling on the matter but it certainly wasn't Jill's. He had never managed to sleep with her and so she became this overwhelming object of importance to him. Somehow, someday, he was going to slip her into his bed. He was obviously certain of that.

  'I need you to come to my office.'

  'For what?'

  'Strictly business. We're doing a new corporate brochure about ourselves and it probably won't surprise you that I want to be the center of attention.'

  As she listened to him, she played with a pair of long scissors with orange rubber-tipped handles. She couldn't remember buying these but maybe they were an old pair she'd forgotten about. Such were the mysterious ways of households.

  'Eric, I'm on the other phone. Let me call you back.'

  'Ten thousand dollarsthat's the figure to keep in your head. Ten thousand, just for a few hours' work of shooting me in various setups at the office.'

  The convent. The aged nuns. Of course! It was as if Eric had read her mind, the bastard.

  She certainly couldn't just turn him down.

  She'd at least have to think about it…

  'How about my office in two hours?' Eric said.

  She felt rushed, confused, resentful.

  Damn call waiting, anyway.

  Then she smiled at herself: that was certainly a mature response to her little dilemma. Blaming call waiting.

  'I can't make it at five. Will you be there at seven?'

  'Hey, babe, remember me? I'm the original workaholic. Of course I'll be here at seven.'

  'All right, I'll see you then.'

  She punched back to Kate. 'God, I'm sorry.'

  'That's all right. I wanted to read that novel any
way. It was only six hundred pages and I had plenty of time while I was waiting for you.'

  'Eric.'

  'Eric Brooks?'

  'One and the same.'

  'That jerk. What'd he want?'

  'Ostensibly he wants me to take his photo.'

  'He's still trying to get you into bed, isn't he?'

  'Maybe he's changed,' Jill said.

  'Why can't guys like him be impotent?'

  'But he's making it very difficult for me. He's offering me ten thousand dollars to shoot him for his corporate brochure.'

  'I'd shoot him for a lot less than that.'

  'You know that convent idea I told you about?'

  'Uh-huh.'

  'Well, for ten thousand dollars I could close the shop down an entire week and really do the convent photos right.'

  'Then I guess it'd be worth it.'

  'I mean, I've held him off for a long time now. I guess I could hold him off for a few more hours.'

  'Just remember to wear that nuclear-powered chastity belt I got you for your last birthday.'

  Jill smiled. 'God, Kate, thanks for being my friend. I'd go insane without you, I really would.'

  'So you going to call Marcy?'

  'Soon as we hang up.'

  'That's Browne with an'

  'Browne with an "e".'

  'Smart-ass.'

  'I'd better get back to the darkroom.'

  'Let me know how it goes with Marcy.'

  'I will. I'll call you tonight.'

  They hung up.

  Jill went to the darkroom. She needed to do some printing and enlarging of the photos she wanted to show Marcy Browne.

  CHAPTER 3

  Rick Corday rented a small storage shed near the north side. The area had become so violent that he kept swearing to get a garage someplace else but as yet he hadn't gotten around to it.

  Now, as he pulled up to his small shed, one of a hundred such sheds inside the cyclone fencing, he saw the two teenage boys he'd had some trouble with the last time.

  One white, one black.

  They'd called him a name he hadn't liked at all and he'd given them the finger.