by John Lutz
“You’re not a dimwit,” Quinn said.
Renz leaned forward, his elbows on the desk. “Listen, Quinn. Two of the released rapists-”
“Wrongly convicted men.”
“Okay. Two of them have solid alibis for the times of death of at least one of the Skinner victims, if not the victim they were wrongly convicted of raping. One of them is back in prison on a burglary rap. Another hanged himself last year in a barn in Iowa. Left a hearts-and-flowers note in his pocket. Claimed he couldn’t find work, couldn’t adjust to society after prison, and the woman he was seeing jilted him.”
“Poor bastard.”
“Friggin’ loser,” Renz said. “But that’s not what we’re talking about. If you read Weaver’s notes and listen to her interviews, it starts you to thinking that maybe this Socrates’s Cavern thing is nothing but a diversion. The killer wanting to off some victims safely before he nails his primary target.”
“We’re thinking that’s the game,” Quinn said. “He’s one of the convicted rapists who were freed on DNA evidence, and he wants his particular finger-pointer and the object of his revenge to be simply one of many Skinner victims.”
“So he’d be just another face in the crowd,” Renz said. “And one who’s already been wronged and would have a dumb-ass jury’s sympathy if he did happen to get marched into court.”
“Weaver tell you this?”
“Weaver tells me facts. I pass them on. You’re the lead detective. You draw the conclusions.”
“I think Weaver is right,” Quinn said. “It’s the same conclusion we reached. And the killer is intelligent. He knows that by now we’ve figured out the DNA prisoner-release connection between the victims. That won’t stop him. The Socrates’s Cavern thing was probably just a stalling tactic anyway. He’ll continue to kill until he’s accomplished what he set out to do. Each victim will have a singular likely killer. One of them will be the Skinner, but we might never be able to separate him from his fellow suspects. Not if he plays it smart.”
“I don’t like that kind of defeatist talk,” Renz said.
“You’re the one in love with facts, and the fact is, we’ve got a new starting point because we let ourselves be led down a dead-end path by the killer.”
“ You let yourself be led.”
“It’s on your watch, Harley.”
Renz pursed his lips and nodded several times, causing his jowls to quiver. One of the little adhesive patches rubbed on his white collar and dropped from his neck to reveal a nasty razor nick. Quinn hoped it stung.
Quinn sat silently, waiting for Renz’s reaction to this new direction in the investigation.
“Science,” Renz said at last. “Goddamned science has caused all this trouble.”
Quinn didn’t want to hear any more of Renz’s lies or rationalizations. He stood up and left.
Behind him he heard Renz say, “I got a new cell phone, and I don’t even know how the damned thing works!”
Join the club.
39
When Quinn got back to the office, Weaver was waiting for him.
Pearl had banished her to a chair over by the coffee brewer.
“You got an emissary from Renz wants to talk to you,” Pearl said.
Weaver had seen Quinn and stood up. She’d helped herself to coffee and walked toward him, the steaming mug held in front of her in one hand, with her thumb on top of the rim to help hold it steady. Quinn smiled inwardly when he saw that Weaver was using Pearl’s personalized cup with Pearl’s initials. Weaver was holding the cup so the initials were plainly visible.
Deftly, Quinn moved into Pearl’s line of vision so she might not notice the mug, and motioned for Weaver to take one of the chairs angled toward his desk.
She swiveled neatly on a high heel and settled into the chair. She was wearing dark slacks and a white shirt, a blue blazer. It was an outfit Pearl often wore. Not today, though, thank God.
Weaver wasn’t a classic beauty, but she was attractive. Compactly built (something like Pearl only not as busty) and easy to look at, with a twinkle in her brown eyes that suggested she was up for anything. As Quinn sat down behind his desk to face her, he noticed a cinnamon scent of perfume.
“I understand you’ve been doing things behind my back,” Quinn said.
“Sex is sex,” Weaver said. There went that twinkle.
“Don’t smart-mouth me. I’ve got Pearl to deal with, and that’s enough.”
“Okay, you made your point and I’m sorry. What I’ve been doing is obeying the orders of my superior.”
“Meaning?”
“I had no choice. But that part of my assignment is over. I came here to tell you that from now on I’m acting as a liaison officer reporting to Commissioner Renz.”
“Isn’t that another way of saying informer?”
“Not in this case. Now all our dealings will be aboveboard, and I’m to be an integral part of the investigation. The commissioner figured you needed help.”
“We met this morning,” Quinn said, “and he didn’t mention anything along that line.”
“I know. He briefed me on this morning’s meeting.” Weaver took a sip of coffee, then leaned to the side and set the mug on the floor so it wouldn’t leave a ring on the desk. “Listen, Quinn, I don’t want to cause you grief. I like you. You were one of the few friends I had on the force. I’d like for us to stay friends. You always understood me. I’ve got an active libido, but so what? Other people have red hair or are left-handed. There are plenty of male cops who lead active love lives and it doesn’t seem to harm them or hurt their chances for advancement. There’s a double standard.”
“Sure there is. I thought you’d learned to live with it.”
“I have. That’s how I made lieutenant.”
Quinn didn’t want to know the details. “So Renz understands you?”
“He understands my ambition.”
“Because he’s ambitious?”
“Because we’re ambitious in the same way.”
Quinn leaned back and looked her in the eye. “Can I trust you, Nancy?”
“Of course you can’t. We both know I’m working for Renz and I’m always going to have to come down on his side of the fence. But I can promise I’ll walk that fence carefully and try to do you as little harm as possible.” She gave him a wan, helpless smile. “Those are the positions we find ourselves in.”
Meaning you can’t trust me completely, either.
“I understand,” Quinn said. He gave her a smile much like hers in return. “We can learn to coexist.”
“I would like one condition,” Weaver said. “I don’t want you to use me to feed misinformation to the commissioner.”
“We’ve got a deal,” Quinn said.
“And I do have a question right off,” Weaver said.
Quinn waited.
“Fedderman over there. Why’s he dressed like he’s graduating from primary school?”
Quinn smiled. Weaver didn’t miss much.
“His old suits finally wore out,” he said.
Part of the truth.
That was what made the world go round. Partial truths.
Quinn and Weaver talked with their heads close together at Quinn’s desk and then left for an early lunch. They asked if Pearl wanted to join them. She said only if she could bring her own knife.
Quinn gave her the look, as if he was headmaster and she was twelve years old and had been caught reading porno with the school janitor.
After deciding to dine alone, Pearl left the office and walked toward the Eighty-first Street entrance to the park, where she could get a hot dog and Diet Coke from a street vendor and sit on a bench and brood while she ate. Mostly because of Nancy Weaver’s arrival at the office, she was in a dark mood. Moody. She felt a twinge. Her mother had always described her that way when she was a child. Pearl would overhear her talking to some of her lady friends: She’s such a smart child, but so moody. Some days she’s so prickly she shoots quills.
<
br /> The man she loved (most of the time) and lived with (part of the time) was having lunch with a professional sex machine, and here was Pearl thinking about her mother.
And, as so often happened-or seemed to happen-when she thought about her mother, her mother called her on the phone.
When Pearl heard the first four notes of the old Dragnet TV show theme and fished her cell phone from her purse, she wasn’t at all surprised to see that the caller was Golden Sunset Assisted Living.
She sighed, or maybe it was a growl. She flipped the phone open and pressed it to her ear so hard that the side of her head hurt.
“Hello, Mom.”
“Pearl, I’ve been calling and calling here from the wilds of New Jersey and your message machine is making that shrill sound like it does when it’s stuffed too full of messages and I was worried sick about you. For all I knew you were lying dead on the floor.”
“You should have called my cell phone number, Mom.” Before jamming up my answering machine.
“Which at this time I am doing, Pearl. I saw on TV here at the nursing home-”
“Assisted living,” Pearl corrected.
“Way station on the road to death. What I saw on the TV was a doctor explaining how, when a woman gets into her forties, it becomes more and more complicated, which is to say dangerous, for her to have a child.”
“You mean grandchild,” Pearl said, driving to the point. “ Your grandchild.”
“Yes. Little Rebecca, waiting in the wings, in a manner of speaking.”
“My wings,” Pearl said, wondering how many other women were walking around not even pregnant with the child they weren’t going to conceive who was already named. Already Pearl was sick of Rebecca, and the kid hadn’t even been born.
“Not that you aren’t my own darling angel, Pearl. A mother’s love encompasses and forgives.”
“Forgives what?”
“So many things.”
Pearl squeezed the phone, causing the built-in camera to activate and snap a picture of her hair.
“As for Captain Quinn-”
“He’s no longer a captain, Mom.”
“He’s not getting any younger, either.”
“I’ll tell him you said that.”
“Oh, he’ll understand. Your Captain Quinn is a mensch and would, I am sure, make a fine father. You two have been romantically involved for a while now, so I know that marriage is on the near horizon-”
“Not that I can see.”
“-and once that happy event occurs, God willing, there still is time, if barely, to create that which you will hold as dear as I hold you.”
“Quinn and I are content as we are, Mom.”
“You think you’re content, dear. As did your father and I, until you came along, and like little Rebecca-”
“Mom, stop it. If I get pregnant, you’ll be the first to know.”
“No, you will be the first, and then you’ll understand every word I’m telling you now of a mother’s best wishes for the daughter she loves. In an instant it will become clear to you.”
“I really don’t have time to talk, Mom. I’m helping to track a killer who’s murdered-”
“Your eggs, Pearl.”
“My what? ”
“Have you checked to be sure you’re fertile? I mean, with a doctor, of course.”
“I don’t want to talk about my eggs.”
“I think we can be reasonably sure that the virile Captain Quinn-”
“You’re starting to break up, Mom.”
“There is someone I want you to talk with, Pearl.”
“About what?”
“You and Captain Quinn. And your… arrangement.”
“What arrangement?”
“Shacking up, Pearl. To put it crudely but not without accuracy. After all, if you’re going to have a child-”
“But I’m not pregnant, Mom. And I don’t intend to get that way. And Quinn and I aren’t living together.”
“Cohabiting, then.”
“Sometimes,” Pearl said.
“Meaning your clothes are in his closet. I shrug, Pearl.”
“Mom-”
“As a favor to your mother, and it’s seldom enough that I ask for one, will you just talk to this person, Pearl?”
“Who is this we’re discussing?”
“Rabbi Robert Gold.”
“I thought you said a person.”
“A rabbi is a person, Pearl.”
“Rabbi Gold and I have nothing to discuss.”
“You can say that never having met the man?”
“I can,” Pearl said. “I did.”
“Pearl, someday Rebecca-”
Pearl flipped the phone closed, breaking the connection.
Talking to her mother was like a debate with the Spanish Inquisition. Win or lose, it was torture.
40
Jefferson City, 1992
The room was small and gray and square. A single rectangular wooden table and two wooden chairs were bolted to the concrete floor. The overhead light fixture was made up of two softly buzzing fluorescent tubes encased in a wire cage. It provided the only illumination in the room. The light was pale and ghastly. The temperature was warm. The odor was a blend of perspiration and lingering fear.
Vincent Salas sat directly across from Westerley. A guard in a uniform that was way too small for him stood outside the single door that had a tall, narrow window in it so he could glance in now and then and see that everything was going smoothly.
Westerley had told the guard it was okay to go ahead and remove Salas’s handcuffs. There was no reason for Salas to make trouble. And if he did, Westerley would welcome it.
Salas was thinner than when he’d stood trial and had already acquired the dusty gray pallor of the longtime convict. He went with the room. His dark hair was cut military short, and the flesh around his sad dark eyes was finely lined. Westerley thought Salas was one of those cons who would age fast behind the walls.
“Are we here to talk about my parole?” Salas asked in a husky voice. He still had at least the vestige of a sense of humor.
“We’re here to talk about your letters.”
“My cigarettes, did you say?”
Westerley gave him a grim smile and pulled two unopened packs of Camels from his pocket and tossed them in front of Salas on the table. A standard form of prison bribery that never seemed to change. Or maybe by now it had become simply good manners.
“I’m rich,” Salas said, and scooped the packs close to him and tucked them in his shirt.
“You didn’t say thanks,” Westerley said.
“That’s because I know they aren’t free.”
“Something else that isn’t free is using the U.S. mail to harass Beth Brannigan.”
Salas settled back in his chair, acting like a man in control. “I think I have the right to correspond with whoever I want to on the outside, so long as the letters pass the censor.”
“I’m going to see that they don’t. And you’re not corresponding with anyone. The letters only went in one direction.”
Salas studied him. “You puttin’ the salami to Beth? Because I never did.”
“Sure, you’re innocent. Like almost everybody else in here.”
Salas touched his chest lightly with his fingertips. “But I am innocent.”
Westerley leaned toward him. “What you’re not anymore is a letter writer. Not if the letters are to Beth Brannigan.”
“What if I get a lawyer and insist on my rights?”
“Your lawyer would tell you that, as a practical matter, you’d better find another pen pal.”
“Practical the same as legal?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes not. This is out-state Missouri and we got certain traditions. Even if you behave in here and somehow get out in ten or fifteen years, I might not be sheriff any longer. But whoever my successor is, or his successor, if you write any more letters to Beth, you’ll wish you hadn’t.”
Salas showed n
o reaction. Penitentiary face already, Westerley thought.
“My guess is you’d make a small mistake that could be regarded as a parole violation,” Westerley said, “and you’d be back here like you were snapped back by a rubber band. That’s if the parole board never saw your letters and granted you a parole to begin with. You start your stretch by harassing your rape victim via the U.S. mail, and the odds are you’ll grow old here and deteriorate along with the buildings.”
“I guess you got them letters in your possession.”
“I do. And I’m gonna hold on to them. And there aren’t gonna be any more of them, or I’ll see that you don’t have to wait ten or fifteen years to wish you’d never learned to write. You’ll limp all the rest of your miserable life.”
“A threat?”
“You betcha. An actual physical threat. But just between you and me.”
“Maybe Beth likes my letters. Maybe she’s in love with me.”
“Like she loves garbage.”
“Some women do love garbage.”
“If she was one, I wouldn’t be here. Anyway, she only read the first few letters. She turned the rest over to me unopened.”
“But you opened them.”
“Sure. I’m the sheriff.”
Salas closed his eyes, as if he didn’t want Westerley to see the thoughts behind them. Then he opened them and smiled. Westerley was liking that smile less and less.
“Can I smoke in here?” Salas asked.
“It don’t matter. I’m leaving shortly.” Westerley leaned in close and locked gazes with Salas. Held steady until he won the staring contest. When Salas looked away, Westerley clutched his face by the chin between thumb and forefinger, as you might do with a recalcitrant child, and swiveled his head back so they were looking at each other again. “You write any more letters and I’m gonna see you alone in another room where there won’t be a guard within shouting distance. You get my meaning?”
Salas didn’t seem scared, but he was paying close attention.
Westerley squeezed Salas’s lower jaw harder and gave him a grim smile. “We got us an understanding?”
Salas said something like “Eyah.”