by John Lutz
A trooper named Gulliver, who seemed to be in charge, approached where Quinn and Pearl were standing in cover and concealment behind two trees grown close together. Gulliver was a spindly guy with a big Adam’s apple; he had long, skinny legs that accounted for most of his height.
“I think he’s straight ahead,” Quinn said softly, “and he’s got a shotgun.”
“We know about the shotgun,” Gulliver said. “It was missing from the SUV.”
“The wife gonna make it?”
“Yeah. Busted up some, but my guess is she’ll recover. She said Evans was holding her hostage, and they were getting ready to set out through the woods, when we arrived. She was talking to him, she said, trying to convince him to give himself up, and when she turned around he was gone. He deserted her.”
“She’s hurt and she’d slow him down,” Quinn said. “Leaving her alive and injured slowed you down.”
“Yeah. It sure wasn’t an attack of compassion.” Gulliver surveyed the clearing and surrounding trees, and the darkness beneath the trees.
“He’s run to ground,” Quinn said. “Had enough. I think if we talk to him right he’ll give-”
He stopped talking and stared in disbelief as Link Evans emerged from the trees on the other side of the clearing. His shotgun rested in the crook of his arm with the barrel pointed at the ground, as if he were starting out to hunt rabbits. He knew there was no hope and he was going to end it his way.
“He don’t look like he wants to be talked out of anything,” Gulliver said.
Quinn felt Pearl snatch at his arm as he moved into the faint moonlight and stepped out into the clearing.
Link Evans looked exhausted. His shirt was torn and hanging half off at the shoulder. His face was stained with sweat and dirt so that his eyes looked dark and hunted, the whites showing all the way around his pupils.
“You’re making the wrong move,” Quinn said.
Link shook his head. “It doesn’t matter when the game’s over.”
Quinn said, “Still and all…”
That was when Wayne Westerley stepped from the trees into the clearing. He was covered with blood and was no more than thirty feet from Link, and he held the twelve-gauge riot gun from his patrol car aimed at Link’s midsection. He was bloodstained and looked ready to collapse, but he held the shotgun steady.
Link managed a wide grin. “Sometimes prayers are answered.”
“Some folks pray and go to hell anyway,” Westerley said.
“You can’t pull that trigger,” Link said. “You’re too honorable a fool to kill the husband whose wife you stole. It’d be against your code. You know you did wrong once, and it’s not in you to do wrong again.”
Westerley said nothing from behind his mask of blood.
“I’m gonna shoot the shit outta you now, Sheriff Westerley, and fine and honorable man that you are, you’re not gonna do a thing about it. That’s ’cause you know you deserve it.”
Westerly’s shotgun roared through the night. He’d squeezed the trigger twice. From such close range Link caught most of the pellets in tight patterns. His body looked as if it might separate in half as he staggered back three wobbly steps and then folded up like a cloth puppet.
Westerley stood still and watched the circle of police slowly close in on what was left of Link Evans. Then, using the shotgun for support, he lowered himself so he was seated on the ground. He looked up as he saw Quinn and Pearl approach.
“I guess he had me wrong,” he said.
Quinn said, “He had you about right.”
86
In a pole tent the state police had set up as a temporary base of operations near Beth and Link’s house in Edmundsville, Quinn stood with a forensic expert named Wellington and examined the contents of Link Evans’s wallet. There were Visa and American Express cards, a Missouri driver’s license, three simple business cards with Evans’s name on them, an AAA card, medical insurance card, and eighty-six dollars, mostly in twenty-dollar bills.
In the single piece of luggage in the trunk of his car, a scuffed leather suitcase, they found his airline boarding pass and confirmation of his flight from Philadelphia to Kansas City.
It was the last flight he’d ever take.
Caught outside the structure of his planning and ritual, the Skinner had gone out in the inglorious blaze so many serial killers covertly sought. Their grand exit, and one last chance to outwit the hunters who were closing in on them.
Winning the game the hard way.
Beth awoke in a hospital bed in Jefferson City. Her ribs were wrapped, and her right knee was in a white plastic cast that made it impossible for her to straighten her leg beyond a thirty-degree angle. That was okay with her, because any effort to move the leg resulted in terrific pain.
She knew she must be under the influence of some kind of drug, because she couldn’t quite piece together the fragments of her thoughts. She remembered last night-if it had been last night. The fear and the horror of seeing Wayne shot. The ringing in her ears, and the smell of cordite. Then the jolting chase with Link in the SUV and the accident. After that it was blank. Here she was, staring up at an IV tube and clear plastic bottle, and with a spasm of pain every time she breathed.
A large man in a wrinkled gray suit came into the room. He had a bony, somehow handsome face with a crooked nose, and straight brown hair that needed a trim. His smile was surprisingly charming as he pulled up a chair so he could sit near the bed. His bulk, the scent of him, suddenly dominated the room. Beth closed her eyes, trying to fit him into the incomplete fragments of last night. He’d been there, at the house and at the scene of the accident. She was sure of that.
She could hear him breathing and knew he was watching her, trying to decide if she was awake and lucid enough to carry on a conversation.
“I’m Frank Quinn,” he said. “A detective from New York.”
“I’ve got painkillers in me,” she said, not opening her eyes.
“I know,” he said. “The nurse told me you were aware enough to hold a conversation, if you weren’t too tired.”
“Is Wayne…?”
At first Quinn didn’t understand who she meant. Then he did. “Sheriff Westerley? He’s badly hurt but alive. The doctors say he’s going to make it.”
“My husband tried to kill him,” she said. “Link. I really think Link was going to kill me, too.”
“Probably.”
She opened her eyes and stared into his. “Where is Link? I don’t remember anything after the accident. There’s a lot I need to know.”
Quinn moved automatically to pat the back of her hand but drew back when he saw the IV needle taped to it.
“I have a lot to tell you,” he said.
Westerley was released from the hospital first. The shotgun blast had sent pellets into his right chest and shoulder. Most of the damage was done to the shoulder and his right upper arm. A single pellet, diverted by bone, had barely missed his heart. Another had creased his skull above his right ear.
When he came to visit Beth in the rehabilitation center where the hospital had sent her, he was wearing a brown short-sleeved shirt and faded Levi’s. Brown moccasins that he could slip on and off easily. His right arm was in a sling. They’d talked on the phone, and she knew he might never regain full use of the arm.
Beth struggled up from the chair she was sitting in when Westerley arrived, and he held her in the crook of his good arm and kissed her. When she looked up at him she was crying.
“If only I suspected… about Link, I mean.”
“No way you could have,” Westerley said. He helped her sit back down in the chair and extend her injured leg. Then he dragged over a nearby chair so he could sit close to her.
“They tell me if I don’t respond to treatment here I might need an artificial knee,” she said.
“Your leg, my arm,” he said. “We can live with that.”
“I don’t like thinking about that night.”
“Then don’
t.”
“Easier to say than do. Sometimes I think it was better when I couldn’t remember anything about it.”
“No,” Westerley said, touching her arm lightly with his left hand. “It’s better to face it and put it behind you. You did nothing wrong, have nothing to be ashamed of. What we both had was bad luck, but we lived through it and we’re together.”
“You’re right. We could be dead, like those women.”
“I don’t waste much time on what might’ve been,” Westerley said. “It’s time now to think about what’s gonna be.” He stood halfway up, so he could lean over and kiss her on the lips.
When he sat back down, he reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew a letter-sized white envelope that was folded in half. “Billy Noth gave me this, Beth. It came in yesterday’s mail. The DNA results from the samples we sent to the lab.” He gave her a look she couldn’t fathom. “You wanna see the results?”
“Do you know them?”
“Yeah. I talked to the lab on the phone.” He shifted his weight, wincing when he leaned on his injured arm. “Trust me, there’s no reason you need to know any of this now, Beth.”
She smiled. “Didn’t you just tell me it’s better to face the facts so we can put them behind us?”
He returned her smile and shook his head. “Seems I did say that. But I didn’t say always.” He reluctantly handed her the envelope.
She accepted it but didn’t open it. “Just tell me what it says, Wayne.”
“Salas’s DNA, Link’s, Eddie’s, and the DNA sample from the rape scene-none of them match except Eddie’s and the rape scene sample, Beth. There’s no way Link could have been Eddie’s biological father.”
“Or that Vincent Salas raped me.”
“But you already knew that, Beth.”
“I didn’t really in my heart. Not for sure. Not until now.”
Beth sat back, relieved. But now she was angry with herself. “All that mess and pain because of my imagination,” she said.
“Your imagination’s what got me looking into Link,” Westerley reminded her. “And it’s what brought us together.”
“It’s all so goddamned confusing,” Beth said.
Westerley shrugged. “It’s a mixed bag, Beth. Like most things in life.” He glanced down at the envelope in her hand. “You wanna keep that, in case of any future doubt?”
She crumpled the unopened envelope and squeezed it into a tight ball, which she handed back to Westerley.
It was about the past. She didn’t need it.
Westerley had been sure Beth would take his word rather than look into the envelope herself, and pretty sure she wouldn’t look in the envelope at all once he’d told her about its contents. The envelope had contained two folded blank questionnaires he’d picked up at the nurse’s station when no one was looking. The actual DNA report, the one that confirmed Link Evans was Beth’s rapist and the father of her child, was folded in quarters and tucked in a back pocket of Westerley’s Levi’s. Before leaving the rehab center, he’d duck into a restroom, tear the report into small pieces, and flush it down the toilet.
Beth didn’t need to know Evans was Eddie’s biological father.
And Eddie sure as hell didn’t need to know it.
The sad fact of the world, Westerley mused, was that sometimes the best way to deal with the truth was with a lie.
87
Quinn sat in his usual booth in the Lotus Diner and absently sipped his third cup of coffee. He didn’t notice its bitterness. Nor was he paying attention to the pedestrians streaming past outside the window, hurrying to make the walk signal at the corner. His thoughts were elsewhere, in a place he wished they hadn’t gone but kept revisiting.
Harley Renz, and apparently everyone else involved, was satisfied with the result of the Skinner investigation, but the assumption that Link Evans was the Skinner kept jabbing like a needle into Quinn’s mind. It would wake him in the middle of the night, and he’d lie motionless and listen to Pearl’s breathing and let his mind work like an Internet search engine roaming the vastness of the ether. How could it come up with the right answers when he kept asking the wrong questions?
Something was wrong. He knew it but didn’t understand why.
Maybe it was because too much didn’t make sense to him.
The attempted murders of Beth Evans and Westerley must have been impromptu, and the Skinner never did anything impromptu.
It was difficult to believe Link had planned the murder of his wife, which he then planned to pin on Vincent Salas-or would have planned-if he really was the Skinner.
And where was the carpet-tucking knife the Skinner was going to use to remove Beth’s tongue? A careful planner like the Skinner wouldn’t have relied on a kitchen knife. It was probably ritualistically important to him to use a particular knife, his special knife that served no purpose other than to carve the flesh of his victims. The ritual knife was nowhere to be found in or around the Evans house.
Adding to Quinn’s doubts, Beth would have been the first Skinner victim to be shot to death.
The case might have been declared solved, but those were a lot of leftover pieces.
With Jerry Lido’s help, Quinn began to dig. It wasn’t that difficult, now that the Pandora’s box of Link Evans’s secret life was wide open. Lido used his legal and illegal skills to trace Evans’s movements during his New York visits. Everyone who moved about on this earth left a trail, and Lido was an expert at finding and following those trails, be they old or new, hot or cold, paper or electronic.
It was time-consuming, assiduous work, but when it finally brought results, things fell into place in a hurry.
Gas receipts, as well as restaurant and motel charges, turned up from an area of Long Island. One of the motel databases had the license number and make of the car Evans and a woman were driving when they checked in. It didn’t match the make or number of Link’s rental car; they must have used the woman’s car that night. A mistake that Lido, months later in a quiet room, pounced on like a famished predator.
A license-plate number was as good as a birth certificate to Lido. It rapidly opened door after door after door. The woman’s name was Julie Flack. She was forty-three years old, lived on Long Island, and was married to a circuit judge.
Then it got easier. She had a Facebook account.
There was her photograph. She was an attractive blond woman with a sly smile. She had a daughter by a previous marriage, liked to sail, shop, and dine out. Her favorite food was Indian. Her alltime favorite movie was An Affair to Remember. Her alltime favorite TV series was Sex and the City. She hated everything about The Sopranos.
Hated The Sopranos?
Lido found that odd.
Within five minutes after his phone conversation with Lido, in which Quinn learned these facts, he made a phone call to Julie Flack.
Her area code indicated she was on a landline, so he identified himself.
“I was expecting the pool-maintenance man,” she said.
“He’ll still turn up,” Quinn assured her. “In the meantime, you have me.”
“Why?” There was a hint of suspicion, maybe alarm, in her voice.
Quinn decided to hit her with it immediately, while she was off balance. “We need to talk about the Skinner murders, and your relationship with Lincoln Evans.”
Silence.
“You do know him,” Quinn said.
“I’d rather not talk on the phone.” Nothing in her voice now. Little Miss Neutral. Probably already thinking about lawyering up.
“I could drive out there,” Quinn said. “We could sit by the pool and chat.”
“I don’t think so. The pool-maintenance man will be here for quite a while, making repairs.”
“Fixing leaks?” Too late for that.
“No, the filter’s causing problems. Letting in the darndest things. Some of them through the phone.”
“We could meet somewhere,” Quinn said.
“Fine. The bar a
t the Medford Hotel? Say six this evening?”
“That would work.”
“Please be on time.”
“What’s really wrong with your pool?” Quinn asked.
But Julie Flack had hung up.
Quinn sat back and smiled. She was a cool one, Julie Flack. Though she had to have been horrified by his call, she’d stayed calm, and in fact managed to stay on top of the conversation, as if she’d called him and casually imploded his life.
Quinn could hardly wait to meet her in person.
88
But it was Julie Flack who was late for their meeting at the Medford. It was already ten after six and she hadn’t appeared.
The hotel’s lounge wasn’t crowded. There were three men and two women at the bar. They looked like business travelers. Others were scattered about the place, alone or in small groups, at the tables or in the black leather upholstered booths.
Quinn had chosen a secluded booth where they could talk privately. He sat where he could see the door, and waited.
He’d made his way through half a martini, when a pudgy white-haired man in an obviously expensive blue suit swiveled on his stool at the bar and walked toward him. He wore a kindly smile and an elegant blue and gold tie. He carried his drink-scotch or bourbon on the rocks-carefully balanced in his left hand.
Quinn realized the man must have been studying him in the back bar mirror.
When he was standing next to Quinn, he extended his right hand. “I’m Morris Henshaw, Ms. Flack’s attorney. She sent me to meet you as her representative.”
Quinn wasn’t surprised, the wife of a circuit judge.
“For all practical purposes,” Henshaw said, “I’ll be Ms. Flack.”
Quinn shook the cool, dry hand and motioned for Henshaw to sit down. Henshaw scooted into the seat across from Quinn in the booth.
“How long have you been sleeping with a serial killer?” Quinn asked.
The kindly smile didn’t waver.
“You said you were Ms. Flack,” Quinn reminded him.