by John Lutz
They went back out on the sidewalk and crossed to the paved roundabout in front of the bank. It had gotten hotter outside. Uncomfortable.
They all said their good-byes. Quinn and Pearl repeated their condolences. Joel Price assured them he would call if there were any developments.
There were just the two of them now on the hot and dusty street, Quinn and Pearl.
“This is what a dead end looks like,” Pearl said.
“Maybe,” Quinn said.
“What happens now?” Pearl asked.
“Whatever it is, it’ll happen in New York.”
Only it didn’t.
Before they could get in the car, Ida Tucker came huffing up to them, forcing a grin.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said, “not inviting you to come to the house afterward and have some lemonade.”
“Really,” Pearl said, “that’s very kind of you but it isn’t necessary.”
The grin widened. She’d been pushing herself, Quinn thought, especially considering her age. He wondered about her. Was she simply what she seemed—a gentle and artful mother? What role, if any, had she played in making Henry Tucker’s letters disappear? People who were experts in conning others often thought themselves more clever than they were. If Ida Tucker had been in on whatever had happened that made their trip from New York futile, was it possible that she couldn’t simply allow the con to end? Were she and some of the others secretly enjoying themselves too much, and had to extend the advantage they’d already exercised? Was that what he was seeing here? Did Ida Tucker, on a subliminal level, want to rub it in?
“I’m thirsty,” Quinn said. He smiled at Ida Tucker. “Lemonade sounds perfect, dear. But let’s drive back to your house in our car.”
“There’s an offer I’ll accept,” Ida said, “since you so graciously accepted mine.”
Gracious. Yes, that was the game they were playing.
49
Everything in the Tucker house hit the correct note—the flowers, the cards and letters of condolences. Everything but a black wreathe on the front door. Or had he missed it?
Quinn was more interested in the permanent objects in the house, rather than those that would be discarded after a period of grieving. The books in the matching white bookcases, for instance. Many of them were on travel. Some were fiction. Eric Ambler, John le Carré, Ruth Rendell, Jonathon Kellerman, Len Deighton . . . clever writers, all of them. No romance, or supernatural, or street-level cop novels here. Psychological mysteries. Suspense. Kellerman was even himself a psychologist. Quinn figured the readers of such books got their enjoyment out of trying to outwit the writers.
Would Ida or her late husband be the sort to write critical Amazon reviews or send taunting e-mails to the writers?
They didn’t seem the type, but mightn’t that be camouflage?
Pearl must have had some idea of what he was thinking, and disagreed. She gave him a look and a shake of her head. Her meaning was unmistakable: Let’s get out of here.
But Quinn had gone from examining books to looking over the family photos on top of the bookcase. Lots of outdoor shots of happy people, their images frozen by the click of a camera. There was Andria, standing close beside Jeanine. Their arms were draped over each other’s shoulders. Neither seemed to have an inkling of what lay in store for them.
There was an interesting man in the background of one of the photographs, wearing an apron and wielding what looked like a large spatula.
“That fella,” he said, to Ida Tucker, who had just entered the living room with glasses of lemonade on a tray. “He looks familiar.”
“That handsome man in the background by the lake? That’s my nephew on my mother’s side, Rubin Hasabedo. He was one of the most famous bullfighters in Spain.”
And my nephew on my father’s side invented the thing that is better than sliced bread. “Not him,” Quinn said. “The man by the grill, playing chef.”
“Oh, him.” A glass rattled faintly against the metal tray, and Ida Tucker seemed to miss a beat. Like a tightrope walker shifting weight slightly the wrong way, then immediately regaining balance and resuming the seemingly casual stroll along the wire.
She began to circulate with the tray, passing out the frosted glasses. “That’s Robert Kingdom, Jr.,” she said, knowing he’d already identified the man.
“You mean Winston Castle,” Quinn said.
“That’s what he’s calling himself now, I suppose. He loves medieval things. Mostly anything British.” She helped herself to the remaining glass, sipped from it, and laid the tray aside on a folded newspaper on the coffee table. “In fact, anything British. Heaven knows why.”
“He has a mustache now. And he’s put on a little weight.”
“He was always robust.”
“You say he’s a family member?”
“Oh, I think we both know the answer to that one. It’s yes and no. Winston was taken in as a ward of the state. He didn’t stay long. He was a restless boy, living in a make-believe world of his own. Kingdom was a good name for him. Castle is, too, I suppose. Doesn’t his restaurant in New York resemble a medieval castle?”
“Very much so.”
“So vedy, vedy British.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t drop in and see him while you were in town.”
“Well, I wasn’t exactly there for a happy occasion,” Ida said. “I didn’t have time for social calls.”
“Too bad you didn’t have a fortnight.”
“We were never all that close, really. Not bad blood, though. Just distance. People do grow apart for no reason other than geographical distance.”
“It can make the heart grow fonder, too,” Quinn said.
“I suppose. But I often suspect those noxious little homilies. May I offer you more lemonade?”
Quinn glanced down and was surprised to see that his glass was half empty. “I’d like to,” he said, “but we have a plane to board in Columbus.”
“If anything of interest occurs, we’ll keep you apprised,” Joel Price said, struggling to his feet with an old man’s hesitancy and obviously sore lower back.
Quinn believed him. He also believed Price still regarded Edward Tucker as his client, however dead Tucker might be.
Quinn shook hands with Price, and everybody said their good-byes. Price was the only one who didn’t seem to have noticed that the ground had shifted. But Price knew.
On the drive back to Columbus, Quinn and Pearl sat silently for a long time, listening to the tires thump rhythmically on the pavement seams. They were both pretty sure of the same thing, that Winston Castle had been the man accompanying Edward Tucker to his safety-deposit box. The average this, average that man with the Band-Aid on his face.
The Band-Aid disguise. Where did he learn that?
Winston Castle and Ida Tucker were playing in a dream game that had become deadly. A game that had been joined by a serial killer who murdered for more than mere profit.
Not that the killer wouldn’t pursue potential profit if it passed before his eyes. It was valuable to him in the way of monopoly money. A prize and a leg up in the game. But nothing more.
Quinn knew he didn’t have to voice any of these thoughts. He and Pearl were mostly of the same mind on this.
“I hope yon Far Castle knight’s face has healed,” she said as they took the cutoff to the airport.
“Not me,” Quinn said. “Not yet.”
Jerry Lido had some information for Quinn that he texted shortly after the plane had landed.
There had never been a Spanish bullfighter named Rubin Hasabedo, famous or otherwise.
Possibly, Quinn thought, Ida Tucker had invented the name on the spot.
Along with a lot of other inventions. Handsome Rubin Hasabedo probably had never been within ten feet of a bull. He might have been Photoshopped from an old menswear catalog into the group photo. Nicely done. Until you thought about it, very convincing.
Olé! Quinn thought.
Prentis, 1995
Dwayne waited for a proper time, then he determined to get out of town when few people noticed him leaving. It was spring break. Honey wasn’t mentioned much in the news these days. Especially with the college kids rolling in and partying all over Florida. Already, an Illinois sophomore in Clearwater had fallen to his death from a third-floor balcony while drunk and convinced he could leap to the next balcony. He had boldly announced his intention so there would be plenty of photographs and YouTube videos. A record of his feat.
Nobody had seemed able or willing to talk him out of it. As the photos showed, he only missed by a few feet, which made for even more public interest and tons of news coverage for a subject other than Honey.
For someone so financially secure, Dwayne didn’t have a lot of worldly goods that weren’t in real estate or in trust. So it was easy to pack some large suitcases, a few cardboard boxes, and drive to the opposite coast, and then north.
It occurred to him one sunny morning that maybe he should continue driving north, all the way to New York. The city teemed with the activity of people on the make, on the way up, down, sideways, drowning. Probably Honey’s death hadn’t even been covered in the news there. Or if it had, it would have been in a simple sidebar.
Under the fold, as they say in newspaper biz. Dwayne’s women wouldn’t give him any trouble once they were under the fold.
Just outside St. Augustine, he stayed in a motel with a red tile roof. It was designed to look old but was actually built only a few years ago. Its king-sized bed was amazingly comfortable and conducive to dreams. He thought he heard the sea whispering to him that night, but couldn’t be sure. In the morning, he drove into town and located the main library.
It was easy to research New York City, and easy to understand how people could lose themselves in such a place.
Or find themselves.
He took the next several days driving to the City, skirting the East Coast and taking his time. For an hour in the Carolinas the killer drove through heavy rain, and occasional hail the size of peas. During a break in the downpour, he stopped for gas and was told there were hurricane warnings beyond Cape Fear. He ignored the warnings. He was from Florida and gave not a damn for hurricanes.
During the next half hour, trees bent with the wind and shed some of their leaves and small branches, but there was no hurricane. A man’s voice on the car radio said the weather on that part of the coast had been downgraded to a tropical storm. He sounded disappointed.
When the killer arrived, he was amazed. Every direction he looked was sensory overload. Was that a celebrity he’d just walked past on the sidewalk, or was he simply someone who resembled a person Dwayne had met along the road? Faces seemed to glide past him. There were celebrities on signs, billboards, and almost certainly in the throngs of people on the wide sidewalks. Odd that in the city of anonymity, a person could become famous overnight.
There was media of every kind here, all over the place. It struck Dwayne that this was the ideal city in which to practice and perfect his craft. There was an endless supply of potential victims.
Not just any woman would do. They would be blond, preferably with blue eyes, and on the fleshy side. Such women would be in the most danger. But there would be other potential victims. He’d know them when he saw them. Innate victims. Prey for the predators. He knew them already. They recognized in him something perilous that drew more forcibly than it repelled.
The city had a police force numbering in the tens of thousands, but as far as Dwayne was concerned, that was simply lots of cops to get in the way of other cops. They were no match for him. Now and then they screwed up and did something right, but not so often that it did more than amuse him.
Which was why Dwayne was glad to find in his research a police lieutenant named Francis Quinn, who had made his reputation tracking and apprehending (or destroying) serial killers. Dwayne would strain forward and read more closely whenever he came across information about Quinn.
The guy was a throwback. He played straight, but he was more interested in justice than in legalities. He was tough, smart, and could be mean as hell. Sometimes he heeded red tape; sometimes he ripped it to shreds. Purportedly, he loved the theater and had even been spotted at the ballet. Odd, that. He looked more like a thug than a cop—a definite advantage in his world.
The only way to win a great war was to choose a great adversary. Quinn, who was practically worshipped by the New York media and, it seemed, by the NYPD, provided the ideal pursuer to match someone like Dwayne.
Did the man have experience and street creds? Dwayne read three times a piece about Frank Quinn in the New York Post. The journalist who interviewed and wrote about Quinn could hardly have drawn a meatier assignment. Some of the most gruesome homicides in the city’s history had been solved by Quinn. The photographs alone gave Dwayne an erection.
The Times saw Quinn as a human thinking machine, who was always two steps or more ahead of his adversary, and whose toughness and relentlessness never failed.
This man would be Dwayne’s principal opponent. His opposite number on the game board of New York.
Dwayne would kill in such a way that it quenched—at least for a while—his desire to kill certain women. The women he needed to kill, and those he knew when he saw them the first time. Women like Maude. Like Honey. It had come to him in a nighttime revelation that from the beginning he’d known he would kill the women.
He’d been their fate. And he would be the fate of more women.
New York would be his killing field, and he’d devise a calling card so the police would attribute each murder to him. He wanted them to know who was commandeering these women’s lives, putting them in hell, and flirting—only flirting—with the concept of dying with them.
He would, from time to time, feed the press information. That might seem to be a help to the police, until further thought would remind them that most if not all early initial information could be used to foul up an investigation.
Dwayne smiled at the idea of his “calling card,” the letters D.O.A. Those hunting him would assume the initials stood for Dead on Arrival, and not Dwayne Oren Aikens. Probably they would never become aware that there was a Dwayne Oren Aikens.
He would kill with increasing frequency and viciousness, this D.O.A. killer. Quinn and his minions would never find or stop him.
The police—Quinn—would come to respect him. Eventually they would envy him. He knew the police by now. He knew how they thought. And he knew the inevitable realization that would creep into their minds.
Secretly at first, even to themselves, they’d understand that they envied him. That they wished they could do what he did. That they were who he was.
They’d sample only an inkling, mostly at night in dreams, but that would be enough to inform them of what they were missing.
But of course they wouldn’t have the courage to expand, to experience. They would not act out what played in the theaters of their minds.
They could only guess how it was. Could be. Would never be. For them.
Dwayne paused to sit for a while on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum and watch the women walk past. Women of every sort and dressed in any fashion. There went the casual sophisticate in slouchy disdain and denim; the prim and businesslike in the costume of commerce (except for shoes made for walking); the twentyish undergrad type with unkempt hair and minimal makeup; the fashion model striding with crossover steps as if on a runway; the intellectual charmer, perhaps a researcher or book editor; the counterculture teenager new to drugs and sex, afraid and on the make.
They thought they were beautiful, these women, but they were not nearly as close to perfection as the women on canvas and in marble inside the museum. In timeless repose, displayed for the admiration of all who passed, their beauty was forever.
There, at an ascending angle to the steps, went a small blond girl with a pert way about her. What used to be called a vest-pocket beau
ty.
Dwayne realized he was smiling. He had so enjoyed his role in Honey Carter’s death. The manner of her death intrigued him. She had died slowly, inch by inch, breath by breath.
His only regret was that he hadn’t been there to observe her.
51
New York, the present
“So that’s where we are,” Helen the profiler said to Quinn.
Sal and Harold had just left to take over the watch on Weaver. Jody was with Pearl. Helen and Quinn were alone in the office. Fedderman was off someplace with Penny, trying to preserve his marriage.
Quinn poured himself half a cup of atrocious but hot coffee from the gurgling brewer and walked over to stand near Helen.
“Where is that?” he asked. “The that where we are, I mean.”
“A family—or what passes for one these days—finds purpose in its existence by searching for a missing piece of art.”
“Bellezza,” Quinn said. “Maybe it’s of great enough value that it’s worth the search.” He shrugged. “On the other hand, it’s not the Holy Grail.”
“It is to them,” Helen said.
“Most of them aren’t even blood relatives.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“No. And I’m afraid to start counting.”
“Maybe not being blood relatives makes them need a cause all the more,” Helen said.
Quinn thought there was a kind of twisted logic to that. But then “twisted” was his game.
“One thing’s for sure,” he said, “ when they’re talking, as often as not they’re lying. We can’t believe anything we hear unless it’s been substantiated.”
“They simply have a different slant on what’s factual,” Helen said.
“Those are the kind of distinctions that tend to disappear in courtrooms.”
“Has it been firmly established that Michelangelo sculpted Bellezza?” Helen asked.
“The church would say no, that Bellezza never existed in flesh or stone. But we know she exists. Rumor had it that a collector named Samuel Gundelheimer had her in his private collection when the Germans occupied France in World War Two.”