by John Lutz
The CSU techs were busy in the front of the stylish but economically furnished apartment. There was a lot of polished wood and black vinyl. Tanya’s dark tangle of hair seemed in some grisly way to go with the decor. She was nude, what had once been her lovely body marked by cigarette burns and intricate carving. Her gaping mouth was stopped with dried blood. A wad of material, probably her panties, that had been used to gag her, lay near her left shoulder. There was a lot of blood on the floor. The look on Tanya Moody’s face suggested she’d died in unimaginable pain.
Quinn caught the slightest acrid whiff of ammonia. He leaned forward to confirm it was coming from the wadded panties and not from the contents of her voided bladder.
Nift had been watching him. “Very good, detective. That isn’t the smell of urine. The killer must have brought Tanya back from merciful unconsciousness by applying a few drops of ammonia on the wadded panties in her mouth. She’d have to breathe in the fumes through her nose. A very effective method.”
“Can you close her eyes?” Quinn asked.
“Why? She can’t see one way or the other.”
“Close her eyes,” Quinn said.
Nift stopped probing and poking with his instruments and deftly closed the dead woman’s eyes.
“Who found her?” Quinn asked.
A very tall uniformed cop standing just inside the bedroom door said, “A woman who lives across the street had an appointment at her place with the dead woman. Tanya never showed up, so she came over to see why not. When nobody answered her knock, she noticed the smell and called the super. They phoned, knocked, got no answer. Then the super used his key, and they found what you see on the floor. That’s when they called us.”
“What kind of appointment?” Pearl asked.
“Physical workout routine. The dead woman was a personal trainer. She made house calls, and also sold her clients home exercise equipment.”
“I thought she might be some kind of athlete,” Nift said, “with those legs.”
“Where are the woman and super who found the body?” Quinn asked the uniformed cop, with a glance at Pearl.
“Super’s in his basement apartment. Dianne Cross, the one who was supposed to get the training, is down in the lobby. My partner’s finishing up talking to her.”
Quinn looked down at Nift. “What about Tanya Moody’s tongue?”
“I probed,” Nift said. “Preliminary finding is that it’s been severed and is missing.”
“May the bastard burn in hell,” the tall cop said, to no one in particular.
Pearl said, “Amen.”
“Can you turn her over?” Quinn asked.
“She won’t object,” Nift said. He carefully rotated the body, disturbing as little around it as possible. Rigor mortis had come and gone, so posed no problem. There were circular burns and complicated carvings on the victim’s back, too. Her wrists were taped behind her, and where her fingers had rested near the small of her back was something she might have attempted to write in her own blood. The blood marks looked to Quinn as if they might mean nothing other than a doomed woman wriggling her fingers. Or the marks might spell out the letters T and S.
Quinn called Pearl over and pointed out the marks. They both stooped and looked more closely.
“What’s that look like to you?” Quinn asked.
“I’m not sure,” Pearl said.
“If I can join the Rorschach test,” Nift said, “that looks like TS. A dying message.”
“If she scribbled it behind her back,” Pearl said, “she might have written the letters backward and meant ST.”
“Then the S would be backward,” Quinn said.
“Maybe,” Pearl conceded.
Nift said, “I already checked the bathroom mirror. There’s nothing written on it, or on any of the other mirrors.”
“Playing detective again,” Quinn said.
“Somebody’s got to.” Nift probed a flaccid breast with some kind of silver instrument. When its point broke the skin, Quinn had to look away. He heard Pearl’s sharp intake of breath.
“It was no worse than her flu shot,” Nift said, amused. “A mere prick.”
“You’re the biggest prick around here,” Pearl said, “even if you’re not the sharpest.”
Nift looked at her seriously. “Have you had your flu shot?”
“Have you had your kick in the balls?” Pearl asked.
That was when Vitali and Mishkin arrived. Sal was his usual stubby and harried self, given to bursts of gravelvoiced comments and abrupt movement. Mishkin was quiet and looked slightly ill. The mentholated cream he used at homicide scenes lay glossy on his bushy mustache. Just standing near Harold could clear your sinuses.
Quinn instructed Pearl to fill in both detectives while he went downstairs to the lobby to talk with Dianne Cross.
He was on the elevator when his memory lit up. TS. He checked the tattered list he kept folded in his wallet and found that he was right. Those were the initials of Tom Stopp, the man who’d been released on DNA evidence after serving a prison term because of Tanya Moody’s inaccurate identification.
Quinn wondered if Tom Stopp had an alibi for the time of Tanya Moody’s death.
Can it really be as simple as this? The victim scrawls her murderer’s initials with her own blood?
There would be ways to find out soon enough. They would find Stopp and lean on him hard. The truth would be in how he’d react, in what could be read in his eyes. Soon they would know if the awkwardly scrawled blood letters took their form coincidentally, or meant nothing at all.
Tom Stopp had an alibi, all right. Early the evening of Tanya Moody’s murder, he’d been rushed to the hospital after suffering a heart attack. Surgery had been performed. He was still confined to bed.
“The elephant sat on my chest,” he said, when Quinn visited him in his room at the Truman Rehabilitation Center. He grinned up from his bed. “That’s what we heart attack survivors say.”
“Have they found the problem?” Quinn asked.
Stopp nodded. “A weak left ventricle. They tried to fix it with drugs, but that didn’t work, so they put in a little thingy that’ll give it a jolt of electricity if it stops beating regular. That’s what I think they said, anyway. I was still kinda groggy with whatever they gave me to put me out.”
“I was you, I’d find out for sure,” Quinn said.
“Believe me, I will.” He stared up at Quinn. “You’re here about Tanya Moody.”
“How’d you know?”
“I watch a lot of news.” His gaze flicked to a small television supported by a cocked steel elbow in a corner near the ceiling. “The world’s going all to hell.”
“Nothing new there,” Quinn said.
Stopp raised an arm with an IV tube attached to it. “Listen, aside from having a perfect alibi, I’d never do harm to that woman. What happened to her, I mean the rape, was shitty, but I never had anything to do with it. Shook up like she was, she made a wrong identification. I don’t hold it against her.”
“You must a little,” Quinn said.
“That’s what I’d be telling you if I was guilty of killing her, trying to act the honest innocent. But the way I see it, serving time on a bad rap is just another example of the way my life’s been screwed up and plagued by bad luck from the beginning, when I was a breech-birth baby.”
“There are lives like that,” Quinn agreed.
“It’s almost enough to make you believe in astrology.”
“Well, your stars were aligned right for this one. Your life was being saved around the same time Tanya Moody was losing hers.”
“Her turn, I guess,” Stopp said. He seemed to get no satisfaction from the observation.
Quinn nodded good-bye and moved toward the door. He turned. “By the way, is Stopp your real name?”
Stopp seemed puzzled. “Whaddya mean?”
“I mean, is it short for something?”
“Craps, losing lottery numbers, second-best poker han
ds, horses that stumble coming out of the gate.”
“Really, what’s your full family name?”
“Lance Thomas Stopp. That’s it.”
“No kidding. Lance has got some pizzazz. Your mom shoulda gone with that one.”
“I dunno. For whatever reason, my mom and dad called me Tom, even when I was in diapers. The wrong name from the beginning. Maybe that’s why my life’s been all screwed up.”
“That kind of thing can happen,” Quinn said.
He wondered if Stopp had any brothers, and if so, what were their first initials.
“You got any siblings?” he asked Stopp.
“A brother Marvin out in California, and a sister Terri, is all. They don’t talk to me anymore. Maybe because I owe them more money than I can ever repay.”
Quinn asked himself if there could be so much self-pity in the room that it might be contagious. It was certainly suffocating.
“Take care of yourself,” he said, and left before the walls closed in on him.
“It’s way too late for that,” Stopp said behind him as the door closed.
The phone call scared the hell out of Sanderson the second he recognized the voice. The call came in over his cell phone while he was walking along Central Park West. Unknown Number, it said on his phone’s ID panel. And when he heard the voice he understood why.
“I don’t like it when plans go wrong,” the Skinner said.
Sanderson had stopped walking and stood leaning against a building in a shallow alcove where he had something like privacy. “What are you talking about? Tan-The job got done. It’s all over the news.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“I gave you your ticket stub, like we agreed.”
“That’s not necessarily enough. We also agreed on a patsy. You guaranteed me that Stopp wouldn’t have an alibi, that he’d be by himself home in bed.”
Sanderson was confused. He’d tracked Stopp. Knew his habits and routine. “Wasn’t he?”
“No. I checked. I always check. When the woman we’re talking about was losing her final battle, Stopp was almost losing his. He had a heart attack and was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. Lots of people that wear white outfits will testify he was nowhere near the apartment when the woman died.”
“Heart attack? You serious?”
“Serious as… well, you know.”
Sanderson’s confusion was fast becoming anger. His fear was moderated by the fact that the Skinner was far away, on the other end of a phone connection.
Or is he far away?
Sanderson’s gaze darted this way and that. Unknown Number. Any of the many buildings around him might contain a public phone. And there were cheap, disposable bubble-packed phones that didn’t provide caller ID. “Listen, I couldn’t know about a heart attack. I mean, that was something out of my control.”
The laugh on the other end of the connection chilled Sanderson’s blood. “Everything is out of your control. You’re like the hunter who tracked a tiger to its lair and found out his gun wasn’t loaded.”
“Listen-”
But the Skinner had broken the connection.
Tiger… Lair…
Sanderson stood with his mind whirling. The hunter analogy had scared the hell out of him. This was terrible. Stopp had been intended as an insurance policy, a patsy held in reserve, a prime suspect with a motive to kill Tanya Moody, and no alibi. Between that and the Skinner’s ball-game ticket stub printed with the time and date of Tanya’s murder, the Skinner would have had a tight alibi. But instead of alibi insurance, what Stopp had provided was a heart attack.
That Sanderson could be blamed for not knowing about it ahead of time was vastly unfair. How could anyone have predicted a coronary event? Or was he supposed to have had a backup plan? Some way to maintain control of the situation?
Well, maybe…
Was the Skinner right? Did Sanderson have any control at all?
Of anything?
Sanderson couldn’t stop looking around, searching with worried eyes. It had been a long time since he’d been so unnerved. He almost dropped his cell phone trying to slide it back in his pocket. It took a few minutes before his hands stopped trembling.
The Skinner walked away from the lobby pay phone in the Clarington Hotel. Across the street and down two blocks, he entered another hotel and went to the bar, where he ordered a Dewar’s on the rocks with a splash of water and sat by himself three stools away from two men and a woman. They were watching an old black-and-white Honeymooners rerun on the TV over the bar. Jackie Gleason was bouncing around in his bus driver’s uniform. Art Carney, as Norton the sewer worker, was patiently trying to calm him, but Gleason was fuming and out of control.
The Skinner smiled grimly. Control.
He reviewed in his mind his phone call to Sanderson. Sanderson had been right in that he, Sanderson, couldn’t control something as unpredictable as a heart attack. That was the problem. It wasn’t so much that the Skinner couldn’t trust Sanderson; for now, he could be depended upon. But eventually, if Sanderson lost his fear, he might attempt blackmail even though he, himself, would be an accomplice to murder.
But all that was in a possible future. The problem with Sanderson now was that he’d become a complication as well as a coconspirator. He was something else that could go wrong.
The Skinner needed-no, demanded -perfection in planning and execution. Complete control. Imponderables made him uneasy. Sanderson was a parasite the Skinner hadn’t so much minded, because he was useful. Not as useful as he thought, but useful. But Sanderson, by his own admission, couldn’t control matters. Which meant that the Skinner couldn’t control Sanderson.
On the other hand, if the Skinner eliminated Sanderson, it would open an entire new avenue of investigation, create a new vulnerability. And for now, Sanderson and his ticket stubs were useful. And who knew what kind of precautions Sanderson had taken? Were there Pandora’s boxes that would automatically open if he were killed? There might be a sealed, incriminating letter in some lawyer’s files, or video recordings lying in a safety deposit box, that would be examined upon his death.
Alice entered the drab apartment carrying a bag of groceries, and Norton quickly stepped between her and Ralph to protect her. Gleason, as Ralph, balled his right and righteous fist, rolled his eyes, and then sat down at a bare table and buried his head in his arms. He wept in frustration.
The Skinner sipped his scotch.
The people at the bar, watching the TV, laughed at something Norton had said sixty years ago.
The Skinner weighed his options.
75
Hogart, the present
“You want me to drive over there?” Westerley asked, after Beth had described Roy Brannigan’s unexpected visit.
“No,” Beth said on the phone. “He didn’t actually threaten me, and he must have had to keep moving to stay on his route.”
“If the whole thing wasn’t a load of bullshit,” Westerley said.
“I believed him about the driving job. I saw the actual truck. One of those big diesel things the drivers leave running even when they go in someplace for lunch.”
“When’s Link due home?”
“Not for two more days.”
“I don’t like it, you alone in that house, especially tonight when we know Roy’s in the area. I could talk to the state patrol. Maybe they’d send a car around.”
“They’d tell you there wasn’t enough reason. Even I know they don’t have enough people to protect every woman who suspects she might be in danger.”
“True enough,” Westerley said. “How’d Roy seem to you after all these years?” He was trying to get a feel for just how real a threat Roy Brannigan might pose. After all, the business about the rape and trial was a long time ago. If time didn’t heal completely, it did tend to cool passions.
“Physically he looked about the same,” Beth said, “only bigger and stronger than I remembered. And he seemed to be calm
ed down some when it came to his religious beliefs.”
“Did his apology seem sincere?”
Beth hesitated. “I can’t say, Wayne.”
Westerley thought about it. “I could have Billy Noth drive out to your place and keep an eye on things till morning.”
“Your deputy’d just love to spend the night sitting in a parked car,” Beth said. “Or hiding in the woods.”
“He could sack out on the couch, Beth. Billy’s a light sleeper.”
Beth didn’t say anything for a long time.
“Wayne?”
“Yeah?”
“How ’bout you, after all? I’d like you to come over.”
“Sleep on the couch?” Westerley asked.
“Don’t try to be funny, Wayne.”
Nothing out of the ordinary seemed to happen at Beth’s that night. And Westerley didn’t sleep on the couch.
When they got up the next morning, he took Beth to the Bob Evans near the Interstate cloverleaf and they had breakfast. Westerley had eggs and biscuits, Beth a waffle and sausages.
“I appreciate you coming here,” Beth said, over their second cups of coffee.
“It’s not like I got nothing in return,” Westerley said with a smile.
There was a rumble outside the window by their booth, and they looked out to see a big eighteen-wheeler with a dusty black cab roll in. It parked some distance from the building with a hiss of air brakes. They stared and saw a short blond man climb down from the cab, stretch, and swagger toward the restaurant. He looked nothing like Roy Brannigan.
“I’m still jumpy,” Beth said.
“I should come back tonight.” Westerley said.
Beth smiled at him and stroked his bare forearm. It made the hairs on his arm rise up. “You’d do this all over again?”
He nodded. “I like the biscuits.”
“I don’t think I need anyone tonight,” Beth said. “Roy’s probably two states away by now. Besides, Wayne, you’ve got a job to look after.”
“The Hogart Bank hasn’t been robbed in forty years.”
“Overdue, I’d say.”
“Has Link got a gun?”
“His twelve-gauge shotgun’s locked up out in the garage.”