Serial fq-6

by John Lutz

  “How did you know Simon Luttrell was dead?”

  “That leaky boat we talked about.”

  Quinn decided not to comment. He stood up, not really surprised that he’d drawn a blank here.

  Turner also stood. It took him a while, as a man grown old and slow. “You know the one part of me that doesn’t get stiff these days?” he asked.

  “I don’t know and I don’t want to guess,” Quinn said as he moved toward the door.

  His dismissiveness prompted Turner to further proclaim his innocence.

  “I’ve got nothing to do with those killings, Detective Quinn, and I don’t know anyone who’d do such a thing. Hell, I’ve got a daughter myself.” He motioned with his head toward a photo in front of his pottery in the bookshelf. A bright-eyed young girl with springy dark hair grinned crookedly at Quinn from a tilted wooden frame.

  Quinn wondered if she knew about her father’s earlier life. He almost asked, then decided it wasn’t relevant. If it ever became relevant, he’d ask.

  “We in the porn industry dislike it more than anyone else if some animal’s out there stalking and killing women,” Turner continued. “It brings heat. Like this visit. And all when you should be directing your efforts toward finding the killer.” The silk kimono swished and sparked rhythmically as he escorted Quinn to the door. It made a faint sound like cellophane crackling. “You believe me, I hope.”

  “It’s not that I don’t believe you,” Quinn said. “It’s more that I’m not sure you speak for everyone in the porn industry. To them, women are product and profit.”

  “Not dead women,” Turner said, opening the door to the vestibule. “They’re trouble.”

  He offered his hand for Quinn to shake, but Quinn ignored it, fearing electrocution.

  Outside on the sidewalk, Quinn wondered if he could believe anything Turner had told him.

  22

  Hogart, 1991

  Westerley and Billy used their flashlights and were helped by whatever moonlight filtered through the leaves. Willis stood off to the side, as instructed. Now that they’d reached their destination, he switched off the flashlight he’d brought from the store. He had no idea where to shine it, anyway.

  Obviously Beth had put up a struggle. The brown carpet of last year’s half-decayed leaves had been violently stirred so that here and there bare earth was exposed. The leaves were thick enough that they prevented footprints, and there were none in the bare spots. Westerley noticed a small strip of torn fabric that looked as if it had come from Beth’s T-shirt. He kept the beam of his flashlight trained on it while Billy stooped and used a tweezers to lift the fragment and bag it.

  Off to the side of where the main struggle seemed to have taken place was a ripped paper sack. Next to it was a six-pack of Wild Colt beer, also ripped open. Westerley went to it and saw that it contained three cans. There were no empty beer cans lying about. Westerley guessed the rapist had punched Beth in the eye in an attempt to quiet her screams. When that didn’t work, he hurriedly grabbed three beer cans for the road and tucked them wherever they’d fit in his pockets or on his motorcycle before fleeing the scene.

  “This the brand of beer Beth bought at the Quick Pick?” Westerley asked Willis.

  “Yeah. That’s all Roy will drink.”

  “The guy you saw speeding outta here on a motorcycle, he look like he was carrying anything?”

  “Nope. Had both hands on the grips. I’m sure of that. Coulda had something tucked in his saddlebags, though.”

  “I’m figuring that,” Westerley said, knowing he was making a lot of suppositions without much evidence.

  “I’m sure it was a Harley he was riding,” Willis said. “I used to own one and I know how they sound, ’specially when they’re idling. Potato, potato, potato.”

  “Huh?”

  “You say potato over and over fast and that’s what a Harley sounds like.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Westerley told Billy to cordon off the scene with yellow tape so he could come back tomorrow and examine it in daylight. Nobody was likely to come along and disturb it anyway, until the rape found its way into the newspapers and on TV, and that would take a while. This wasn’t St. Louis or Kansas City.

  When Billy was finished cordoning off a rough square by winding crime-scene tape around four trees, the three men trudged from the woods, following the wavering flashlight beams. Willis walked out ahead, leading the way as if he were guiding an expedition.

  When the convenience store lights were visible through the trees, Billy leaned close to Westerley and said, “Potato, potato, potato.”

  Early the next morning Westerley returned to the crime scene alone. He surveyed the area of the struggle carefully. About ten feet from where the rape must have taken place, he found marks where a motorcycle had been parked. There was a clear indentation from the cycle’s kickstand. He searched for tire tread marks but couldn’t find any.

  When he was about to leave, he saw what looked like a dark stain on a dry brown leaf. He stooped low and examined it carefully. It was no more than half an inch across, but he thought he could detect a splatter pattern. He was pretty sure it was blood.

  Beth hadn’t bled much, if any, so it might not be her blood, but that of her assailant.

  He carefully lifted the entire delicate leaf with tweezers and managed to slide it into one of the plastic sandwich bags the sheriff’s department used for evidence bags. He sealed the top of the bag carefully.

  The hospital had been unable to obtain any blood from beneath Beth’s fingernails, though she’d said she’d scratched her attacker, so this blood could be valuable evidence if it was the same type as the suspect’s.

  If they had a suspect.

  Westerley recalled the words of a former Missouri politician about a wordy but ineffective bill that had passed the legislature. Now if we had some bread and we had some mustard, we could have a ham sandwich, if we had some ham.

  23

  New York, the present

  On Quinn’s instructions, Vitali and Mishkin revisited the apartments of both Millie Graff and Nora Noon. Something might have been overlooked. Something that linked one or both women to the New York underworld of seamy sex, or to each other.

  The two detectives were in Nora’s apartment. It was bright and warm from sunlight beaming through the windows.

  Vitali was sorting through the stifling second bedroom, stuffed with hangered garments and bolts of fabric. Mishkin, in the other bedroom, was carefully removing, then replacing, intimate wear in the dresser drawers. He handled the dead woman’s silk and lacy items with his fingertips, a faintly disturbed and embarrassed look above his bushy gray mustache. Sal, glancing in now and then from the room across the hall, reflected as he had many times that his partner shouldn’t have become a cop. The tedious and often repugnant part of the job too often got to Mishkin.

  The results were in from the NYPD nerds who’d explored the victims’ computers. Millie Graff’s hard drive was mostly full of dancing and dancers. Restaurant hostess though she might have been, her dream of professional dancing was still strong. There was a site about “the art” of pole dancing, but it actually did seem to concentrate more on the techniques of dancing with a pole than on eroticism. Her e-mail account was mostly about business matters, and discussions of dancers’ progress or lack of same. Her personal account suggested she didn’t have a lot of friends in the city, and at the time of her death no romantic involvement. While online, Millie visited the Drudge Report almost daily and read the digital version of the New York Times. Fair and balanced.

  Nora Noon also had visited the Times online. In fact, it was her home page. Illustrations from several fashion magazines were on her computer, along with a downloaded book by Susan Isaacs. She had visited an online dating service a few times but hadn’t signed up. Like Millie, she had a business e-mail address as well as a personal account. The business account was completely about business. The personal account revealed nothing hel
pful. Nora had also been on Facebook, but most of her input was a thinly disguised ploy to establish business contacts.

  “These women,” Mishkin said loudly so Vitali would hear in the other room, “seem to have been normal human beings, but very, very busy.”

  “It’s a wonder they found the time to get killed,” Vitali rasped. Lint or something in the air of the crowded little room kept making him almost sneeze.

  “They were career women,” Mishkin said. “A dancer and a designer.”

  “Wannabe dancer.”

  “Same thing. Just a matter of timing.” Harold the optimist.

  “Everybody’s got a career, Harold. Even if they just call them jobs.”

  “I mean more than a job, Sal. More like a calling. That’s why both victims led such busy lives.”

  Sal shoved his way out of Nora N.’s storage room. Or oversized closet. He wasn’t sure what to call it. Whatever, it was sure full of lint. He sneezed as he entered the other bedroom, where Mishkin toiled.

  “God bless,” Mishkin said. He was holding up a black thong. “This isn’t part of a swimming suit, Sal. It’s too fragile.”

  “Those thong things are popular as underwear, too, Harold. Which is what that one is. Probably most women under seventy have got at least one in their wardrobe.”

  “How do you know that, Sal?”

  “I just do. Like I know red buttons often turn things on.”

  Mishkin found something else interesting in Nora’s dresser drawer. “What are these things that look like halves of hollowed-out cantaloupes with foam in them.”

  “That’s a bra, Harold. It’s used when women wear a gown that doesn’t have straps.”

  Mishkin held the attached shallow foam cups out at arm’s length and studied them. “They don’t look as if they’d support anything.”

  “They do, though, Harold. And they make it possible to have bare chest, back, and shoulders above the dress without a brassiere strap showing.”

  “Got it,” Mishkin said. “They work on the principle of the cantilever. Like those houses on the hills in California, where half the place hangs out over a long drop to the valley below.”

  “Harold.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Put the damned thing back in the drawer and let’s get out of here.”

  Mishkin did that, and was shutting the drawer when he noticed something on the floor. A slip of lined paper that looked as if it had been torn from a small spiral notebook. He picked it up and looked at it.

  “Here’s something, Sal. It must have dropped on the floor when I was pulling stuff from the drawers. There’s writing on it. A man’s name and a phone number.” He beamed at Vitali. “I think it was in the same drawer as the thong and cantilever bra. Maybe we got something big here, Sal.”

  “If he isn’t an insurance salesman or plumber,” Vitali said.

  He liked to keep Mishkin’s expectations low. Harold could be crushed and depressed for days when something this promising didn’t pan out. A real pain in the ass, given to brooding.

  Vitali slipped the folded piece of paper into his shirt pocket so Mishkin wouldn’t think too much about it.

  24

  Things had changed. Candice Culligan could afford to take a cab home from the office now. She’d recently been made a managing partner in Kraft, Holmes, and Deloitte, a law firm specializing in corporate research and litigation.

  Candice (never Candy) might look like a showgirl, with her tall frame and hourglass figure, not to mention generous lips that looked like but weren’t the product of collagen. Her long hair was lush and red, her eyes large and blue. And there was something in those eyes that kept people at bay, especially all but the most adventurous men on the make. Like there was a certain pride in her chin-up, long-strided walk. But Candice wasn’t only for show, despite the fact that she was a show wherever she went. Candice was smart.

  It hadn’t taken Marty Deloitte long to figure out how smart, because Marty was no dummy himself. Soon after Candice joined the firm four years ago, Marty had made her his protege. Both of them ignored the snickers. Marty, sixtyish and too bowlegged even to look good in his four-thousand-dollar suits, was happily married and had four teenage sons who were constantly in trouble because he ignored them so he could work long hours. Margie, his wife, didn’t question or complain about his dedication to his work. Not even after she’d met Candice. It wasn’t so much that Margie was trusting (though she was). Their rambunctious sons kept her busy visiting neighbors, schools, and sometimes police precinct houses and courtrooms, setting things in order to shrink the fines and prevent incarcerations. She didn’t have time to worry about whether Marty was screwing somebody else. If he was, she’d eventually find out, and then she’d castrate him.

  Kraft, Holmes, and Deloitte was one of the most successful and wealthy firms in the city. They could afford to pay well, and they did. They could also be slave drivers, mercilessly pushing their employees for more and more billable hours. Within a month at the firm, Candice had gotten sick of the term billable hours.

  As a managing partner, Candice was now beyond all that. She’d gotten the commensurate big raise and bonus. And the caseload. She’d usually worked her cases with Marty Deloitte at her side, sometimes proffering his advice. And the right cases, like that well-publicized child-abuse custody battle, had come her way. Everything had broken just right for her.

  She’d recently moved into a new condo in SoHo. Also, she’d begun dating Riley Carter. He was single, handsome, and the co-producer of the new cable TV quiz show Fingers and Toes. The idea was that contestants had to type their answers, and each time they were wrong one of their fingers was taped to the finger next to it. This impeded their typing, so those with the most wrong answers wound up slapping at the typewriter with what might as well have been mittens, which allowed slower-thinking contestants to catch up. That made for some tight contests. Toes had nothing to do with anything except, as the unctuous host endlessly proclaimed, making it easier to count your winnings. Candice thought the whole thing was stupid and unwatchable, but she never told Riley. Why should she? Fingers and Toes was one of the highest-rated shows on cable television.

  Her cab zoomed and veered and did everything but fly as it made its seemingly reckless way down Broadway toward her new condo. Confident that there would be no collision, that she was lucky in all things, Candice leaned her head against the cab’s seat back and smiled.

  Half a block away from her condo, the rush-hour traffic finally clogged the avenues and came to a stop. Or maybe there was an accident or construction up ahead. Her cabbie, a young guy with a beard and turban, twitched behind the steering wheel and drummed his palms on the dashboard, impatient to fly some more. Candy knew exactly how he felt. She used to feel that way when things weren’t moving fast enough for her.

  When vehicles had finished inching up on one another, getting as close as possible to gain precious pavement, it was obvious that traffic wasn’t going to move. Not for a while, anyway.

  Candice paid her cabbie, tipping generously, and climbed out of the cab. Walking would get her home faster than staying in the vehicle. Other taxi passengers were following the same plan. They were familiar with traffic this time of evening. The subways would be packed, too. And it wasn’t a bad evening for walking, even if still on the warm side. People emerged from at least half a dozen cabs lining Broadway and joined the throngs on the sidewalks. The forward motion, at last, was exhilarating.

  Along the avenue Candice strode, now and then catching a glimpse of herself reflected in a show window. She couldn’t help but smile wider at the woman smiling back at her. She had a great job, an interesting love life, a new condo unit that was everything she’d dreamed it to be, plenty of money. And a future almost too brilliant to comprehend.

  Candice understood and fully appreciated her luck. She had everything she could possibly want, and in the greatest city in the world.

  She also had a shadow.

  The s
hadow had a knife.

  25

  Hogart, 1991

  The morning after the rape of Beth Brannigan, Sheriff Wayne Westerley carefully placed his meager findings from the crime scene in the trunk of his cruiser. They consisted of a series of Polaroid shots, a quick-set plastic cast of the motorcycle kickstand indentation in the earth, and a plastic bag containing the dried brown leaf with the blood splatter on it. Not much, unless they also had a suspect. Westerley knew the odds were long on that, and getting longer with each passing hour.

  He took a last look around the crime scene, thinking it was odd how a residue of emotion seemed to linger where great violence had occurred. As if somehow the very air knew that the harm done extended far beyond the victim. He tried to imagine what had gone through Beth Brannigan’s mind last night, but decided he couldn’t. What he should be doing, anyway, was trying to figure out what had gone on in the assailant’s mind. That might provide some help in apprehending him before he did even more harm.

  As soon as Westerley settled himself in behind the steering wheel of the cruiser and bent forward to twist the ignition key, he received a radio call. It wasn’t his clerk and dispatcher, Ella; it was his deputy Billy Noth.

  “Ella picked up a highway patrol call, Sheriff,” Billy said. “Some young boys searching the woods for arrowheads came across a man stretched out on his back. They figured he was hurt, so they went and got their dad, who was waiting back by their car. He went with them to the scene and saw that the man was drunk or stoned unconscious. Also saw who his description fit. He went back to his car with the kids and drove to a phone, where he called the highway patrol. They’re on their way.”