Frenzy

by John Lutz

  Phoenix climbed down out of the van, walked around it, and got a long-handled pool skimmer out of the back. A breeze ruffled his swept-back dark hair as he swiveled his handsome head to look in all directions. His gaze slid right over Dwayne.

  Dwayne knew the skimmer was a prop. In the off chance somebody dropped by and caught Phoenix and Maude together, Phoenix could stop whatever else he was doing and begin skimming leaves and debris out of the pool. Just like that, he would become the proper and preoccupied hired help, engrossed in his job rather than in his employer.

  With the skimmer propped on his shoulder, he strode across the lawn toward the back of the house and the pool, where he assumed Maude would be waiting as planned.

  As soon as Phoenix was out of sight, Dwayne went to the van and opened the door on the passenger side. He gave the knife that he’d used on Maude and his father a final wipe with the tissues so it would be free of any fingerprints that weren’t smeared. Then he slid the knife beneath the passenger seat, closed the door softly so Phoenix wouldn’t hear, and hurried out of sight, concealing himself near the bushes by a big date palm.

  Less than another minute passed before Phoenix reappeared, carrying the pool skimmer at waist level now. After leaning the skimmer against the van, he walked up to the front porch. He wore a slight frown, and seemed aggravated and vaguely puzzled.

  Dwayne knew what Phoenix was thinking. Maude was probably still in bed. Her husband was gone, and even if he wasn’t and came to the door, Phoenix could go into his pool cleaner routine. The worst that could happen is that Phoenix would actually have to clean the pool. If Dwayne’s father wasn’t around, Dwayne himself might come to the door and would tell him where Maude was.

  Assuming an attitude of boldness, Phoenix leaned on the doorbell.

  When he got no response, he knocked.

  Knocked again. Harder. This was turning out not to be a good morning.

  His hands propped on his hips, he left the porch and strode back toward the van. Then he changed his mind, kicked a small rock off the driveway, and went back up on the porch. He knocked again.

  This time when he got no response he tried the doorknob.

  It turned. The house was unlocked.

  Phoenix eased the door open, stuck his head in, and yelled hello. Shouted, “Pool man!”

  Dwayne had never heard Phoenix refer to himself as “pool man.” It sounded like some kind of superhero who rescued people who bumped their heads on their diving boards.

  After the third hello, Phoenix called for Maude. When he got no response he called Dwayne’s name.

  Phoenix stood for a while, pondering, then seemed to gather resolve. He went inside, leaving the door open about a foot.

  Time passed. The jagged shadows of palms trees dancing in the breeze moved this way and that on the porch.

  Dwayne waited.

  When Bill Phoenix emerged from the house, he was white. Dwayne was surprised. He didn’t think a person—especially one with such a great tan as Phoenix’s—could suddenly turn so pale. Phoenix was stumbling as he walked toward his van. Something that had to be vomit glimmered on the chest of his sleeveless T-shirt and down one leg.

  Dwayne stepped out onto sunny the driveway and walked toward him, grinning. He raised a hand in greeting. “Hi, Bill. You seen Maude?”

  Phoenix staggered past him and didn’t seem to have seen him.

  “Hey, Bill . . .”

  “Don’t go in there!” he heard Phoenix call, as he clambered into his van. “For God’s sake, don’t go in there!”

  Dwayne watched as the van roared and shot backward. It swerved back and forth, once even going off the driveway and onto the grass. Leaving tire marks. Good. Dwayne couldn’t see the van when it reached the street, but he heard its tires squeal as it sped away.

  Dwayne would have liked it if the van had slammed into one of the palm trees, but this was okay.

  He walked back to the house to phone the police. He wanted to call them before Bill Phoenix did. If Phoenix ever would.

  Not that it mattered. The police would contact Phoenix.

  32

  New York, the present

  “The police have released the bodies of my girls,” Ida Tucker said.

  Sitting primly across from Quinn and regarding him over his desk, she looked much younger than she had to be, which was somewhere in her eighties, perhaps nineties. Her back was straight, her chin outthrust and confident. Her blue eyes were steady. From years ago, a beautiful woman looked out from the ruins. “I’ve come to take them home, where they can rest with their family.”

  “I can’t tell you, dear, how sorry I am for your loss.” Quinn meant it, and his sincerity came across in his voice.

  Ida Tucker swiped at an eye with the knuckle of her right forefinger. Quinn pulled a tissue from a box on his desk, then stood up and leaned over the desk so Ida could accept it. She folded the tissue in halves, then in quarters, and used it to dab.

  “It’s a hard thing,” Quinn said. “Time might not cure, but it can help.”

  “Time is my best friend and worst enemy,” Ida Tucker said.

  “So it is with us all.” Thinking deep thoughts.

  “I suppose.” She took a final dab at her eye and slipped the tissue into a pocket of the blue cotton tunic she was wearing.

  “May I make an observation?” Quinn asked.

  “That’s part of your job, Detective Quinn.”

  “Andria was rather young to be your daughter.”

  “My husband Robert and I took her in as a ward of the state when she was quite young. We later adopted her.”

  “She was an orphan?”

  “Let’s just say she was unwanted.”

  “I see.” Quinn wondered if there was any kind of police record, juvenile or otherwise, on Andria. He doubted it. Jerry Lido wouldn’t have missed that kind of information. But then, why would he even look in that direction? This family seemed to have been pieced together with disparate parts, yet there was a curious glue that held them together. Before Quinn sat a woman who seemed too frail to be thought of as their guiding matriarch, but age and experience could harden a soul and give it the gift of guile.

  Ida Tucker clasped her hands in her lap. “I was glad when I got the message at my hotel that you wanted to see me, Detective Quinn. I also wanted to see you. Have there been any meaningful developments in the murder investigation?”

  “We’re always working to develop new leads.”

  Her blue-eyed assessment suggested that Ida Tucker knew bullshit when she heard it.

  “I take it you haven’t learned anything new,” she said. “It’s my understanding that if they’re going to be solved, most murder investigations are successfully concluded within the first forty-eight hours.”

  “If that’s true,” Quinn said, “it’s because in most homicides it’s obvious who is the killer. Quite often it’s the spouse standing over the body with a gun.”

  She gave that some thought. “Yes, I can see where that would be true beyond the make-believe world of entertainment.”

  “But very often it’s evidence we discover during the first forty-eight hours that turns out to be important.”

  “I see. So you still have hope?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Our family hasn’t fared too well when it comes to the timely solving of crimes,” Ida Tucker said.

  “Tell me about this unsolved crime,” he said.

  “During the war—the big war—an English woman shipped something to Willa Kingdom in a large wooden crate.” Ida held her steady gaze on Quinn, making sure he understood. “From England to Ohio, where Willa lived with her husband, Mark. They’d just moved to Ohio. Mark was in the Merchant Marines and was badly wounded when his ship was sunk by a German submarine.”

  “That’s too bad,” Quinn said, thinking about how her information dovetailed with Lido’s.

  Ida shrugged. “War.” She carefully adjusted her skirt, which had worked to within a
few inches of one of her wrinkled knees. “When Willa pried the box open, it contained some bricks, and under the bricks were handwritten letters explaining what had been in the box, and why.”

  “Were the letters from the English woman?”

  “Yes. Betsy Douglass was her name. The letters related what a British soldier named Henry Tucker had told her. It all made sense, except for the bricks, which obviously replaced what Betsy Douglass had shipped from England.”

  Quinn considered asking Ida if what Betsy might have shipped was Bellezza, but he decided to play that card close instead. There was no reason to tell Ida Tucker more than she needed to know. And there was reason to see how much she’d tell him.

  “Why did this Betsy Douglass ship something to Willa?”

  Ida leveled her gaze at Quinn. “Betsy Douglass was Willa’s sister. Willa was born in England.”

  Quinn was interested in where this was all going. At sea on the waves of lies.

  “Where are the letters that accompanied the box of bricks?”

  Ida shrugged a bony, somehow still elegant shoulder. “They went missing.”

  “Stolen, you mean?”

  “Possibly. They were available, then they were gone.” She gave a sad grin that was almost a grimace. It made her suddenly look her age. “Part of the unknown original contents of the wooden crate.”

  “Willa must have read them.”

  “No. She simply glanced at their headings and signature, then replaced them in the box to examine them later. She was going to read them, then something interrupted her. I think she received a phone call. When she went to retrieve them, they were gone.”

  “So none of you knows what was in the box?”

  “It appears that way.’

  You sly old fox. You know what the box contained.

  “So who was the phone call from?”

  “That I don’t know. People were calling Willa all the time. She volunteered a lot at church.”

  Quinn just bet she did.

  Ida took a deep breath. “But that’s not what we’re talking about. And I’m here to claim the bodies of my daughters.”

  “Andria and Jeanine?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m just trying to keep things straight,” Quinn said. “But they aren’t really sisters. I mean blood relatives.”

  “Andria and Jeanine, as it happens, had the same biological father. He was a man they were well away from.”

  Hmmm.

  Quinn’s desk phone jangled like an alarm. He held up a hand, raising a forefinger to signal Ida Tucker that they weren’t finished talking. As he picked up the receiver, Ida settled back in her chair. She was dug in, prepared to accept the worst of whatever Quinn might dish out.

  The caller identified himself, before Quinn could get a word out. “Renz.”

  “I’m busy right now,” Quinn said.

  “Okay, but there’s something you oughta know.”

  “I keep running across that,” Quinn said.

  “Something new on the DNA findings. Somebody at the lab doing a standard reevaluation of the blood samples noticed it. Two of the killer’s victims have very similar—”

  “Sisters,” Quinn said. “Or maybe cousins.”

  “Choose one or the other,” Renz said.

  “Cousins for now. But I wouldn’t want to make my guess permanent. It’s complicated.”

  “That’s a good word for it,” Renz said.

  “You know that hedgerow maze at the Far Castle?”

  “Yeah,” Renz said. “It looks confusing.”

  “Well, that’s how this is.”

  Quinn looked across the desk at Ida Tucker.

  She was smiling.

  33

  The killer wanted to see if Weaver went someplace unexpected. Someplace where there would be privacy if he arranged for them to be alone.

  It wasn’t unexpected that she headed directly toward work at the offices of Q&A. Maybe she had paperwork to catch up on. Runaways to find, burglars to apprehend, killers to kill.

  All in a busy day.

  Weaver paused near a doughnut shop, and stood as if contemplating. It was still morning. Not so late that she shouldn’t enjoy a breakfast doughnut. Or maybe she’d already had breakfast and was going to buy doughnuts for the other cops. They’d owe her something in return. Unless she was repaying a doughnut debt of her own. That was how cops thought; somebody always owed somebody. Doughnuts were the coin of their realm. They took that crap seriously.

  As Weaver crossed the street toward the doughnut shop, the killer found a place where he could lean on a black painted bannister and pretend to study a map. He looked like a tourist today, even carrying a cloth bag advertising a Broadway show. A long-running revival of a revival starring a burned-out cast. Something a tourist would savor.

  Through the doughnut shop’s steamed window, he saw Weaver slide into a booth while balancing a mug of coffee and a plate containing several doughnuts.

  All for herself. Selfish bitch.

  Or maybe not. She had to watch what she ate, with a body like that. A beauty for sure, but she’d have to control her diet in middle age.

  If she reached middle age.

  The killer settled in, knowing he’d be here awhile. Within a few minutes, he found himself getting hungry for a doughnut.

  Quinn hung up the phone after his conversation with Renz. He hadn’t told Renz about the box of bricks and straw that had been shipped from England, and he didn’t mention the letters. They seemed to have disappeared, anyway.

  Ida Tucker was still sitting patiently in her chair, her hands folded in her lap.

  “Who do you think took the letters that were in the box?” Quinn asked her.

  “Whoever took what else was in the box. Unless you think someone actually sent Willa a box containing nothing but bricks and straw all the way from England.”

  Quinn thought it was possible that the box’s original contents were stolen in England, before the box was shipped, but he didn’t mention the possibility.

  “What do you think happened to whatever was taken from the box?” he asked.

  Ida gave her frail shrug. “It’s a mystery.”

  “Here’s another one,” Quinn said. “Why did Andria Bell call Jeanine Carson several times from LaGuardia airport the day she died?”

  “I wasn’t aware that she had. Maybe Andria simply wanted to let Jeanine know she was in town. They were sisters.”

  “That’s true. DNA samples indicate that Andria and Jeanine were actually related by blood.”

  Ida fixed icy eyes on Quinn, as if her lies were a match for his facts any day. “It isn’t a pretty picture. It involves degradation and rape.”

  Quinn tapped the sharp point of a pencil over and over on his desk and regarded Ida Tucker. She must have such ugly memories, know so much that she dreaded reliving even in her mind. Quinn decided not to make her paint that picture once again. Or the original picture, painted over.

  Ida visibly swallowed. “Some of the foster homes the children were placed in were nightmares. When Robert and I decided to adopt, we met Jeanine. She was only ten years old. We had to have her. Then, when we learned she had a younger sister, we felt the kindest and best solution was to adopt both girls, raise them the rest of the way like the sisters they were.”

  “Did it work out okay?”

  “Yes. Until they encountered the madman in your city.”

  “I apologize for my city,” Quinn said. He leaned forward and gently patted the back of her hand. “I mean that, dear.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “It’s odd though, wouldn’t you say, that both sisters would happen to encounter the same madman?”

  “A giant statue of a woman with a torch, standing on a tiny island out in the ocean, is odd. Riding in trains under the ground is odd. A seriously undressed cowboy playing a guitar at a busy intersection is odd. A giant ape climbing a skyscraper is odd.”

  “That last is just in the m
ovies,” Quinn said.

  “And the other three?”

  “Well . . . I get your point.”

  Ida stood up and smoothed her skirt. “If we’re finished here, I’ll go about the process of claiming my girls’ remains.”

  “One thing more,” Quinn said. “You never mentioned your adopted son, Winston Castle.”

  For a moment Ida seemed to draw a blank. “Oh! Is that what he’s calling himself now?”

  “Yes. He owns a restaurant here in town.”

  She waved a hand and smiled. “Good for him. He can be . . . rather aimless at times.” Her smile broadened. “Like the rest of us. Anything more?”

  “No,” Quinn said, marveling. “You might drop by and see Winston.”

  “I might. Thank you for bringing him to my attention.”

  Quinn was finished talking to her anyway, so he let her call time. He had a feeling they’d have more conversations.

  At the door, she paused and turned. “Will I have to identify the bodies?”

  “They’ll probably request that you do. It won’t be as bad as you might imagine. They try to make it as easy as possible. Would you like me to send someone with you?”

  “No,” she said, after giving it a few seconds’ thought. “I’ve seen worse, though I can’t remember when. I can manage this.”

  “If you have any questions . . .” Quinn said. “Remember you have my number.”

  “I do have questions,” Ida said. “Some I want answered, and some I don’t.”

  He watched her go out into the sauna the city could become after a summer rain.

  One of the questions Quinn wanted answered was who were the other people on Jeanine’s cell phone? Most of them, he was sure, were simply friends, business associates, neighbors, businesses she frequented. Checking each number might be a waste of time, but it had to be done. And who could know if a real clue might present itself?

  And if this family was so close, why had Winston Castle pretended that Ida Tucker wasn’t his mother? And why would Winston Castle’s mother not mention their relationship? Or seem not to think much of it when Quinn brought it up?