by John Lutz
“But I remember the way Duffy’s head was flattened on one side.”
“God, Sherri—he was hit by a car.”
“But maybe only injured, and whoever hit him finished him off.”
“Why?”
“They didn’t want to go to all the trouble of dealing with a hurt dog. It might bite them. And they wouldn’t want it bleeding all over their car if they tried to pick it up and take it to a vet. It would be simpler just to get rid of the dog and drive away.”
“You’re saying they had a kind heart, or they would have just driven on and left Duffy injured and dying on the road. Instead, they put the poor animal out of its misery.”
“I’m saying whoever ran over Duffy and hurt him might have then gone ahead and murdered him.”
Rory faked a strangled kind of laugh. “You really think anyone would go to that kinda trouble over a dog?” He knew immediately the words were a mistake. He understood how Sherri’s mind worked. She’d ask herself why indeed someone would take that kind of trouble. The possible answers would include that they might know Sherri and fear she’d blame them for killing her dog. The next step in her logical process might lead her straight to Rory. “Whatever happened,” he said, “Duffy’s dead and you have to put the whole thing behind you.”
“I can’t. It isn’t Duffy’s death I keep thinking about; it’s like death in general. About how in this amount or that amount of years one or both of us, and most of the people we know, will be gone forever.” She looked up at him. “Do you ever really think about forever, Rory?”
“All the time.”
“Don’t laugh at me.”
“I’m not, Sherri, believe me!”
She moved away from him, rooted through her purse, and fished out a small brown vial with a pop-off white plastic cap. Rory saw a prescription form stuck to the bottle.
“These help me. You know they can help you.”
“Yeah. We’ve gone through this before, with the pills. I almost wrecked the car. This time it’s no thanks.”
Sherri held the vial up and read the label: “ ‘Lorazepam. ’ The only way I can get to sleep now is by taking one of these, or by sneaking some of my dad’s scotch. But the whiskey doesn’t work as well. When I drink it I can fall asleep, but I can’t stay that way.”
“I know how that works,” Rory said.
Sherri smiled. “My mom’d never dream I took these and have been using them.”
“Didn’t she ask you about them?”
“Just if I knew where they were. I said no, and reminded her how she misplaced things. She had a lousy night’s sleep and then had the doctor call in a new prescription.”
“They’re easy to fool, aren’t they,” Rory said. “Doctors and mothers.”
“Too.”
She opened the vial and shook a small white pill into her hand and held it out to Rory. “Take one. You’ll like the way this works. It like makes you stop worrying instead of making you sleepy. Then if you want, you can go to sleep on your own.”
“I don’t want to go to sleep.”
“I just told you they don’t make you tired, just relaxed.”
“I’m relaxed enough.”
“You don’t seem like it.” She popped the pill into her mouth and swallowed it, as if she was used to taking pills without water.
“I know how I can get more relaxed,” Rory said.
“Forget that.”
He sighed. He knew she was thinking about what had really happened to the dog. She’d never let it alone. That was the way her mind worked. He knew that because his mind worked the same way.
They’d professed their love to each other. Why couldn’t she look ahead instead of backward? Was this how life worked? Dragging around the past like chains that made you raw and tired and eventually brought you down.
Rory was a realist. He understood that when Sherri figured out what had really happened to her dog, that Rory had lied to her, and that he’d even used the dog’s death to help him to seduce her, what they had together would be gone.
It was enough to make a person squirm. Lying to friends was one thing, but lying to someone you loved was different. Those were the lies that became chains.
Do you really think about forever? Sherri had asked him.
All the time.
61
New York, the present
“I’m used to him now, because I know he’s not real.”
“Used to him in what way?” Grace Moore asked her patient.
“It’s almost like he came with the apartment,” Linda said. “When I enter I catch a glimpse of him crossing in the hall from the bathroom to the bedroom. If I’m in the kitchen and can’t see him, I know he’s still back there. I suspect he hides under the bed.”
“Have you ever looked?”
Linda stared at her. “Are you kidding?”
“You told me you know he’s not real.”
“But he could become real, and then where would I be?”
“If he wasn’t real when he went under the bed,” Grace said, “he wouldn’t be real when he stared back at you if you bent down and looked to see if he was there.”
Linda looked incredulous. “He could reach out and get me. Have me by the throat in half a second so I couldn’t make a sound, then he’d do whatever he wanted to me. If you were me, would you take that kind of chance?”
Grace thought about it. “No,” she admitted. She crossed her legs and sat back in her chair. “Does he ever talk to you?”
“No. Not him. Just the voices in the stone.”
“If he could talk, what do you suppose he’d say?”
“You mean if he would talk.”
“I suppose I do mean that,” Grace said.
“He’d say, ‘I’m here to torture and kill you.’ ”
“Why would you think he’d say that?”
“You know why. I’m a paranoid schizophrenic. And besides that, I’m his type.”
“Oh?”
“I keep up with the news, all the stuff about the serial killer, Daniel. I look like the women he’s killed. Same size and build. You know, with big boobs. Same brown eyes and brown hair.” She decided not to tell Dr. Moore yet about meeting with someone who might believe her, might help her.
Grace smiled. “Linda, if I didn’t dye my hair blond, I’d look like that. Well, maybe not so much in the boobs department, but I have brown hair and brown eyes. Like millions of women in New York. Why do you think that killer would settle on you?”
“He’s in my apartment.”
Grace tilted her head and nodded. The logic of the irrational was difficult to refute. “Have you tried talking to him?”
“Yes. He doesn’t answer, only smiles or shrugs and goes someplace where I can’t see him.”
“You mean disappears?”
“Of course not. He simply walks into another room.”
Grace regarded Linda for a long moment. “Do you think he’ll be there when you leave here and go home?”
“He almost always is, after a session.”
Grace smiled. “You have him trained.”
“Or he has me trained. Same difference. He’s my—”
“Your what?”
“My fate.”
Grace shook her head. “Oh, Linda, that isn’t so. You have control of your own life.”
“Then what am I doing here?”
“Getting the help you need. Our sessions, your medications. Have you been taking your meds as prescribed?”
“Of course. He stands somewhere behind me and watches in the mirror as I take each pill.”
“Hmm. I have an idea, Linda. You say he’s almost always in your apartment when you come home from these sessions. How about if I go home with you and meet this man?”
“You mean after one of our sessions?”
Linda was going to be elusive now and protect her hallucination. Not uncommon. “I mean after this session.”
“I doubt if he’ll talk to you.”
“Oh, he knows,” Linda said. “He’s followed me here. I watched him once hanging back behind me in the elevator and watching to see which door I entered.”
“You mean my door, to my office?”
“Right. He stood down the hall a way and watched.”
“Then he and I really should talk.”
“You’ll be doing most of the talking,” Linda said. “But if that’s the way you feel about it, okay.”
Grace was slightly surprised by Linda’s acquiescence. And pleased. It might mean she was ready to face up to what, on a basic level, she knew wasn’t actually real. This might lead to what the TV psychoanalysts called a breakthrough. She looked at her watch. Ten minutes to eleven.
“I don’t have another appointment until two o’clock,” she said, standing up from her chair. She smiled reassuringly at Linda. “Let’s go.”
Linda braced herself with both hands on her chair arms, levered herself to her feet, and smiled back.
“Just sit for a minute in the anteroom while I shut things down here in the office, and I’ll be right with you.”
Linda went out and settled into a comfortable chair, and the doctor didn’t take long at all.
Linda led the way out of the office and down the hall to the elevator. Already she was acting as the hostess, and would in subtle ways be in charge of this visit.
Dr. Moore considered that a good thing.
“If you don’t mind,” Dr. Moore said, “I’d like to drop by my apartment first and get out of these high heels; I’ve got a blister and they’re killing me.”
“I hear you on that one,” Linda said.
“There are two messages for you,” Pearl said, when Quinn returned to the office from lunch. “Both from women who think someone’s following them.”
“We’ve had more than a few calls like that,” Quinn said.
“Since the media have made you the big hero and serial killer hunter.”
Quinn made a sound somewhere between a snort and a laugh.
He ambled over and lowered his large self into his desk chair hard enough to make the cushion hiss. Pearl wondered if he’d been “lunching” with Jerry Lido. “Either of these calls sound like the real thing?” he asked, already sure of the answer.
Pearl shrugged. “One didn’t make much sense, or maybe I couldn’t understand the caller because of her accent. The other seemed okay at first, then she asked that no one contact her doctor to let her know she’d called.”
“She say what kind of doctor?”
“She didn’t have to.”
Quinn punched a button on his desk phone and listened to both messages. The first was in a high-pitched voice speaking in what sounded like some kind of middle European accent he couldn’t begin to understand.
The second caller was understandable, a woman speaking with what sounded like deliberate and fragile calm, explaining how the same man had been following her, how sometimes he let himself into her apartment. She then said that she didn’t want her doctor to know yet that she was going outside the rules, calling someone who might believe and help her. Her doctor, the woman said, didn’t think the man was real. Then she explained that it was true that he wasn’t real all the time, but only sometimes.
Neither woman left a name, but the voice of one was familiar.
Quinn sat for a moment mulling over the calls. He’d received dozens like them over the past several weeks. There was something about the second woman, something in her voice that signaled real if sublime fear. Perhaps she had mental problems, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t be a potential victim.
And the woman with the accent? How could he judge if he couldn’t understand her?
He looked at caller ID. The first number was that of a large insurance firm with a Midtown office. He called there and talked to three people who had no idea of the identity of a woman with a heavy European accent who might be trying to contact him.
The second number displayed no name but had a Manhattan prefix. He called it and got no answer and no invitation to leave a message.
After hanging up, Quinn stared at the phone, then dug through the note papers beneath a paperweight on his desk. The second caller’s number was that of Linda Brooks, with a West Side address.
Linda Brooks, the woman who’d approached him in the office because she thought someone might be following her. The one who was under analysis.
She’d also left her doctor’s name and address.
Quinn jotted down the information on a piece of scratch paper and tucked it into his wallet with similar folded slips of paper.
He wasn’t quite sure why, considering how many women like Linda Brooks there were in the city. Seldom were their monsters real.
Real enough to them, however. He felt a pang of pity for Linda Brooks. Started to reach again for the phone.
But she hadn’t wanted him to call her analyst. About that she’d been specific.
Yet she wouldn’t answer her phone. And who was to say she needed more help than the woman with the European accent who’d called? Or any of the other troubled and frightened women, most of whom weren’t in any actual danger?
Quinn wished he could help them all, the fearful and delusional, but he couldn’t except in general ways. Like trying to stop a very real killer.
He turned his mind to his job.
62
It had taken only fifteen minutes for Dr. Grace Moore and Linda to cab from Grace’s apartment to Linda’s. Grace had changed into more comfortable shoes, and left the thumb drive video of her session with Linda with her other home files.
The phone was ringing inside Linda’s apartment, but it stopped just as the two women got to the door.
“Do you have an answering machine?” Grace asked.
“Not anymore. It talked to me sometimes when it shouldn’t have.”
Linda unlocked and opened the door but stood back, allowing Dr. Moore to enter first. Grace did just that, smoothly and confidently. She took in the apartment with a glance: neat, neutral furniture that was carefully arranged, a small flat-screen TV resting on what looked like an antique table, hardwood floors that were scratched and dented but glossy with a recent coat of wax, a bookcase stuffed with books and stacks of magazines (so Linda was a reader), and a window with half-lowered white blinds. A lineup of small, potted geraniums spanned the marble sill.
“I bought those yesterday,” Linda explained, noticing the geraniums had caught Grace’s attention. “Now nobody can climb in through the windows without disturbing my flowerpots.”
Grace simply nodded, thinking the flowerpots didn’t provide much security.
Linda was only halfway into the apartment, as if she was still considering staying out in the hall. Grace gripped her gently but firmly by the arm and guided her the rest of the way in. She could feel tremors running through Linda’s body.
“Why are you so nervous? You’re home. I’m here.”
“And he’s here,” Linda said.
“The reason I’m here,” Grace said, “is to demonstrate to you that he isn’t.”
“Hah!”
“So how does he get in?”
“Obviously, he has a key.”
Grace almost smiled. “Tell me, Linda, is this person part of the secret government organization you mentioned during our last session?”
“Oh, no. He’s on his own. I’d know it if he was with the government.”
“How?”
“He’d be dressed differently, for one.”
“Like the government agents you see on TV or at the movies?”
“I don’t go to the movies very often. That stuff isn’t real.” A click and a low, soft humming made Linda’s body jerk.
“That’s only the refrigerator,” Grace told her.
/> “So maybe he’s getting something from it. A glass of milk.”
“Has he done that before?”
“Of course. He’s left the glass out where I could see it, with just a little milk left in it. I know why he does stuff like that, so it creeps me out. He wants me to hope he goes ahead and does whatever he’s planning, wants me to give up and put my fate in his hands. Work with him.”
Grace raised her eyebrows. “Work with him?”
“You know what I mean.”
Grace did. Linda was referring to the theory that victim and killer sometimes fell into a mutual rhythm and cooperation. The killer wanted his prey. The victim wanted the terror and anxiety finally to end. In a sick sense, their goals became the same.
“Is it possible that it was a glass of milk you drank and then forgot about?” Grace asked.
“Possible? Sure.”
The apartment was silent except for the refrigerator’s soft hum. The air was warm and still. Grace walked to the doorway leading to the small galley kitchen and stood staring while Linda watched.
“Nobody in there,” Grace said. “No empty glass.”
More geraniums in green plastic pots, though, lining the windowsill. Some of them still had price tags on them.
“I didn’t say for sure he was there,” Linda pointed out.
Grace turned so she was facing her patient directly and made eye contact. “What do you think he wants, Linda?”
“To do the most awful things to me.”
“Have you been reading the papers about those women who were killed?”
“Now and then. And I see things on television.” She didn’t tell Dr. Moore about her conversation with the detective, Quinn, who was hunting the killer. He seemed, if not to believe her, not to totally disbelieve her.
“Television can stimulate your imagination,” Dr. Moore said. “Especially if you haven’t taken your meds.”
“It’s difficult to remember to take them,” Linda said. “And he comes when I’m not here and moves things around. Sometimes I have to hunt and search for my meds.”
“Do you want me to look through the apartment while I’m here to convince you we’re here by ourselves?”
“I wouldn’t ask you to do that.”