Frenzy

by John Lutz

  “What? Why?”

  “No time to discuss it now,” Pearl said. “Just do it. Stay outside and wait. Someone will be along faster than you imagine.”

  Jesse was silent, obviously thinking over this instruction from a woman she’d never met.

  “Remember not to touch anything,” Pearl said. “Where are you now? Exactly.”

  “On the front porch.”

  “Leave it, then stand outside the front of the house, out on the sidewalk, and wait. Please hurry so I can make another call.”

  “Is my aunt Lucille in trouble?” Her voice was tremulous.

  “I think so,” Pearl said. “Please do as I instructed.”

  Jesse promised she would, and seemed eager to meet some authority at the house.

  After Pearl hung up, she told Lido about Lucille Denner and her classified ad.

  “Doesn’t sound like much,” Lido said.

  “But better than you know what.”

  Pearl called Quinn’s cell.

  Quinn walked over to a corner of Renz’s office so he could barely hear Renz’s conversation on his desk phone with Minnie Miner. He figured Renz couldn’t overhear his cell phone call from Pearl.

  Pearl stayed on point and kept the conversation brief.

  Quinn said, “I’ll pick you up on my way.”

  Renz hung up the landline phone at almost the same time Quinn finished his conversation with Pearl.

  “Minnie Miner,” Renz said, though he’d already let Quinn know that by using Minnie’s name. He was fishing to see if Quinn would reveal his caller.

  “Pearl,” Quinn said, satisfying Renz’s curiosity. “Probably about nothing.”

  Renz crossed his arms, waiting, so Quinn told him about his conversation with Pearl.

  “You’re right,” Renz said. “Probably some crackpot with a worthless family heirloom. You’ll probably find a bust of Carrie Nation.”

  “I might not recognize her,” Quinn said. “Your call?”

  “Weaver.”

  “You referred to her as Minnie.”

  Renz put on his innocent face. “No, I didn’t. Just mentioned Minnie’s name, I’m sure.”

  Quinn knew Renz was lying, but arguing would get them nowhere. Renz. You had to watch that bastard every second.

  “What did Weaver want?” Quinn asked.

  “She said people have told her Minnie Miner mentioned her—though not by name—on Minnie’s ASAP show. “ ‘A new food server at that delicious new restaurant has a secret in her pretty little head,’ I believe were the exact words.”

  “You gonna pull Weaver?” Quinn asked.

  “She mighta just gotten more valuable right where she is,” Renz said. Knowing Quinn would understand. Weaver was being classified as expendable, though she’d have all the protection the law could muster while she was being dangled as bait before the killer. Would Quinn go for it?

  “Make sure she’s covered every second,” Quinn said.

  Renz gave him a look. “You know we will. She’s one of ours.”

  Quinn knew Renz was sincere. There was no need to mention that leaving Weaver exposed waiting tables while Minnie Miner blabbed away on her TV show might be downright dangerous.

  “I’ll give Weaver the word,” Renz said. “Make sure she knows what’s going on.”

  And reassure her it’s safe, so she won’t back out.

  Quinn left the precinct house and climbed in the Lincoln to pick up Pearl for the drive to New Jersey. When he was tooling along on the FDR Drive, he lit a cigar and used his cell phone to call Weaver. No doubt Renz had already talked to her.

  Weaver answered on the third ring, and acknowledged that she and Renz had discussed the Minnie Miner problem.

  “You okay with this, Nancy?” Quinn asked, gaining ground on a big stake truck hauling a load of gigantic polyvinyl pipes. For a moment the truck’s exhaust fumes smelled stronger than his cigar.

  “I’ve been bait before,” Weaver said. “Even did a stint with Vice for a while. And we know this killer already has me in his sights. I wouldn’t mind a chance to get back at him. This might be fun.”

  Quinn doubted that. He was sure Weaver did, too.

  He told Weaver about the ad in the Teaneck Tattler in New Jersey, and how he and Pearl were going to drive there and check it out. He thought it would be a good idea to keep Weaver clued in from this point on. They owed her that for the odds she was about to accept.

  “Could be nothing,” Quinn said.

  “Good leads or bad leads, they teach us something even if we don’t always know it,” Weaver said.

  Must be scared, if she’s philosophizing.

  “I’ll let you know if anything unusual goes on here at the castle,” Weaver said. “Or anything other than the usual unusual.”

  “Be careful at that place, Nancy. The play acting could become serious.”

  “Surely you joust,” she said. “And don’t forget I’ve got my knights in shining armor.”

  Quinn drew on his cigar and jacked the car’s speed up over the limit, all while passing the truck with the PVC pipes on the right. Though he was on the phone, his eyes were more or less fixed on the road. He was thinking of a dozen things other than driving.

  “Don’t take any chances,” he reminded Weaver.

  The phone pressed to his ear, he listened to nothing. The connection with Weaver was broken.

  63

  Quinn drove hard. He and Pearl made good time out of Manhattan to New Jersey. They were soon in Teaneck, and found Lucille Denner’s address on Garritson easily, using the GPS plugged into the Lincoln’s cigarette lighter.

  Most of the houses on the block were small, built in the flurry of construction not long after the Second World War. Additions had increased the size of some of them as the families within them had grown. Denner’s house was one of the smaller ones and well kept, painted a pale beige that was almost cream colored, with dark brown shutters and door. There was a white trellis on one side of the house, in what might have been an effort to make it appear wider. Scarlet roses blossomed wildly on vines that had made it halfway up the trellis. On the opposite side of the house was an attached single-car garage. The grass was thick and green and almost to the point where it needed to be trimmed.

  Quinn parked the Lincoln blocking the narrow concrete driveway leading from the closed overhead garage door, just in case.

  He and Pearl got out of the car and walked up onto the low wooden porch that was painted the same brown as the shutters. Quinn thought he could smell the nearby roses, but that might have been the power of suggestion.

  He knocked on the front door several times, and wasn’t surprised when he got no response. Pearl moved over on the porch and tried to peer behind almost-closed drapes but could see nothing inside but darkness. She stayed on the porch while Quinn walked around to the back door and knocked.

  Again no response.

  He returned through thick grass to the front yard.

  “I’m here,” a woman’s voice said.

  They turned to see a middle-aged woman, obviously once shapely but now with a thickened waist and neck. She had long graying hair combed to hang straight down, like shutters she was peering between. Quinn thought a middle-aged woman had to be beautiful to wear her hair that way. It made this woman look as if gravity had a special hold on her features. She had an outthrust chin and worried gray eyes.

  “Jesse?” Pearl asked.

  “Yes. I decided to stand down the street behind a tree and see who arrived at my aunt’s house.” She gave an embarrassed smile that showed crooked teeth. “You two passed inspection.”

  “Did you get away from the house immediately when I told you?” Pearl asked.

  “Yes. As soon as we got off the phone.”

  “Very good,” Quinn said. He tried the front door and found it locked.

  Jesse said she had a key and fitted it to the knob lock. It worked with a low and hesitant clatter, as if it might be as old as the house and h
adn’t been used often. If there was any other kind of lock on the door, it wasn’t fastened.

  Quinn used his large body to block her so he could enter first.

  He found himself in a small but well-furnished living room.

  Pearl gave Jesse a slight, reassuring smile and said, “You better wait here and we’ll call you.”

  Jesse looked dubious but nodded her assent. Now that there were two more people here, people with authority who would know how to handle things, she wasn’t so frightened.

  Pearl smelled something all too familiar. Faint, but definitely there.

  “Watch where you step and what you touch,” Quinn said.

  Pearl could see beyond him a huddled form on a dining room floor.

  “Lucille Denner,” Quinn said.

  “No doubt,” Pearl said.

  “Somebody must have answered her ad.”

  “A dissatisfied customer.”

  Quinn led the way as he and Pearl entered the dining room. It was dim, but neither of them wanted to open drapes or turn on lights and disturb a crime scene. Besides, there was more than enough light to see the dead woman on the hardwood dining room floor.

  “Careful not to step in any blood,” Quinn cautioned.

  Pearl moved closer to the body so she could see the dead woman’s forehead. The letters D.O.A. were there. They looked like the letters found carved on the earlier victims.

  Quinn nodded toward the other side of the dining room, beyond a wooden table and chairs that were centered beneath a wrought iron chandelier.

  Pearl moved carefully around the perimeter of the room, past a dark mahogany china cabinet, and saw half a dozen jagged pieces of ceramic on the floor. She fitted them together in her mind and came up with what looked like the head and torso of a bare-breasted woman who might have been Bellezza.

  If the bust had been marble instead of ceramic.

  Or had ever been touched by Michelangelo.

  The classified ad in the Teaneck newspaper had obviously sent someone on a futile mission. Quinn could imagine the killer taking one look at the pathetically obvious imitation and hurling it to shatter on the floor before taking out his ire on the unfortunate Lucille Denner. His knife and lit cigarette had been wielded with particular viciousness.

  “Do you think she really figured she might sell that thing to some naïf?” Pearl asked.

  “Maybe to one out of twenty,” Quinn said. “And to somebody who thought they might be putting one over on her by getting a great work of art cheap.”

  Pearl could only shake her head.

  “What’s the percentage of hardcore addicts who get sick or die because of poison they thought was coke or heroin?” Quinn asked.

  “Could be one out of twenty,” Pearl said.

  “And the one out of twenty here might have been the first caller,” Quinn said.

  Which made Pearl glance around uneasily, as if fate were creeping up on her.

  “I checked,” Quinn said. “Her phone’s a land line. But we still might be able to get a caller log.” Even as he said it, he knew the killer would be too smart to leave a record of his call about the classified ad.

  “What strikes me,” Pearl said, “is that he’d be too wily even to inquire about that obviously imitation piece of junk.”

  “It served its purpose,” Quinn said.

  “Which is?”

  “To get us wasting time standing here talking and thinking about Lucille Denner’s murder instead of closing in on him.”

  “Not motive enough.”

  “Spooking us into thinking he could be going interstate again.”

  “Still not enough.”

  “And to demonstrate how powerful he is.”

  “Motive enough,” Pearl said.

  Quinn got out his cell phone and called a sergeant he knew in the Teaneck Police Department.

  Then he called Minnie Miner. She might as well waste the time they might have wasted.

  Quinn saw Pearl raise an eyebrow at the mention of Minnie’s name.

  “Might slow her down” Quinn said. “Then she can talk about all those ads for Bellezza busts being withdrawn from eBay.”

  “Pearl? Detective Quinn? Anyone?”

  Jesse’s voice. It sounded as if she had her head stuck inside the open front door.

  “Better stay where you are, dear,” Quinn said.

  But she didn’t. Curiosity and concern for her aunt Lucille prompted her to enter the house. Pearl heard her coming and tried to head her off but failed. Jesse saw what was on the dining room floor.

  And would have nightmares the rest of her life.

  64

  The killer parked behind a black SUV, diagonally across the street from the Far Castle. He was driving his old gray BMW. The car was a plain four-door model, and because it was a luxury car, so often had its styling been mimicked that it was a vehicle that drew little attention. It looked at a glance like a million other cars in Manhattan. At the same time, it was very fast. The killer valued anonymity and speed. Who knew when one or both would be needed?

  He lowered the windows and switched off the engine and air conditioner. The radio was tuned softly to classical music, Holst’s “Jupiter.” One of the killer’s favorites.

  Where he’d parked put him in a perfect position to observe diners at the restaurant’s crowded outside tables. He could also see people come and go.

  He’d done this kind of surveillance before, but now he knew who he was looking for. The server Minnie Miner had mentioned—though not by name—on her daily TV news show.

  The killer was by now familiar with all the food servers, and he was interested in the most recently hired, a blond woman in her forties. Quite attractive. His trained eye had become suspicious the first time he’d seen her. She looked her part as a Medieval serving wench and seemed to play it with gusto. More gusto, in fact, than skill at her job. Serving food wasn’t quite her thing, the first couple of times he’d observed her. Then she became more adept, less often accidentally knocking over water glasses, or stepping on diners’ toes, a quick study adjusting to her role. An adjustable wench.

  The killer had to smile at his own cleverness. Perhaps he’d share the pun with his victim, at the proper time.

  Then there was the evening when he was watching and the blond waitress had spoken briefly with Quinn when he passed her on the way to enter the restaurant. It wasn’t much, but it was more than an uninterested hello. They’d moved apart quickly, like magnets with opposite polarity. Too fast and too late. These two people knew each other, and had taken care not to display the body language of even a casual encounter.

  So the woman was obviously a plant. The killer didn’t jump to that conclusion, but it took only a few more days to erase most of his doubts. The restaurant’s owner and wannabe famous chef, the unctuous Winston Castle, treated the blond one differently from the other food servers. He was almost deferential when speaking with her. The suggestion by Minnie Miner that there might be a food server who was some kind of spy cinched it—Blondie was an undercover cop.

  With a little more investigation and a pair of binoculars he recognized her. Nancy Weaver. The one who almost got him.

  What was she doing at the restaurant? Had she made the connection between Castle and the nutcase family searching for the Unholy Grail? She must be trying to solve the killer’s perfect murders. What—if anything—had she found out? Had Quinn, Pearl, and the rest of them made the connection between some of his victims and the search for Bellezza? Surely they had by now. That was part of the killer’s game. He had chosen Quinn as his adversary because the man was no fool.

  At first the killer hadn’t been interested in anything but playing out his deadly game with Quinn. But after coming across the search for the missing (if it ever existed) art treasure, he’d become more and more interested because of the pure truths told by his dying victims.

  The talkative Grace Geyer had piqued his interest at the museum. Grace had led him to question And
ria Bell in the Fairchild Hotel at knifepoint and with fire. Andria couldn’t have lied to him. Not deliberately. But how much of what she’d told him was fact, he couldn’t be sure. He could be sure that she believed everything she’d told him.

  And he’d be sure Weaver would speak the truth. She would tell him what she knew, what the NYPD knew, what Quinn knew. About the D.O.A. killer, and about Bellezza.

  He could feel the familiar stirring in the very core of his being when he thought about Weaver. Questioning her would be such a pleasure! He simply had to learn a little more about her, so he’d know when she was most vulnerable. Then he’d do what he was best at, and she’d respond as they all did. She’d know who he was, what he was, and resistance would run out of her. They all came to a certain point—and early in the process—when they understood that they were already dead. This time he’d be the victor. Fate couldn’t be resisted, so why try? Fate was the trickster and the sly ally of their inquisitor.

  That was what Quinn didn’t understand, that fate was the killer’s coconspirator. Fate had brought the killer, his pursuer Quinn, the family that was on its possibly quixotic search, and Bellezza, together. Fate and the killer, who were as one.

  The killer had signaled to Quinn more than once that since Grace Geyer’s death, the missing art treasure and the murders were intertwined. The killer had seen to that. He’d even taken two victims, a married couple, to make his point. A subtle but unmistakable message as increasing pressure was applied to Quinn; even as Quinn would sense the intensifying needs of his quarry.

  There was little doubt that Helen Iman, the profiler working for Q&A, would be telling Quinn that he, Quinn, was winning, that the killer was becoming more and more desperate and irrational. But what did the big, gawky profiler know about what was rational?

  What did she know about fate?

  As the killer mused about the events that had led him to where he sat in his parked car, observing his next victim, he marveled again at fate. Fate was responsible for everything that had happened since his return to New York. Fate was the architect of it all.

  Maybe Helen the profiler would figure that out using the process of elimination.