by John Lutz
“But if I did it, would you be convinced?”
“I suppose so, but—”
“There aren’t that many places he could hide. It will only take a few minutes. Do you want to come with me?”
“No. And I’d rather you didn’t go looking for him.”
“When you think he’s here like this, do you ever simply leave?”
“Of course I do. He just follows me. Sometimes he’s already waiting for me when I arrive wherever it is I go.”
This interested Grace. Hallucinations weren’t uncommon in schizophrenia. Linda had reported them before.
“How is that possible, Linda?”
Linda shrugged and gave Grace a look that suggested the answer was obvious. “He understands me so well he knows most of the places where I go.” A glitter of fear played in her eyes. “How would you like to live with something like that?”
“Sometimes,” Grace said, “it helps to face your problem squarely and it won’t seem so intimidating.” She began moving toward the hall leading to the rear of the apartment.
“I wouldn’t go there,” Linda said, starting to follow her. Three steps and a pause.
“There’s no need to come with me,” Grace said. “I’ll look every place anyone could possibly hide, then I’ll call for you.” She walked a few feet down the hall and glanced into the bathroom. The plastic shower curtain was closed. She went to it without hesitation and yanked it open.
“The drip isn’t in here,” she said, and heard Linda, who’d been peeking around the door frame, laugh.
Grace didn’t like the tone of that laugh. She moved farther down the hall toward the bedroom. Linda, who was torn between keeping a safe distance and not being left alone, was hanging back and looked frightened.
“He isn’t in there,” Grace said, when she was at the bedroom’s open door.
“He is. I can feel it.”
“The room feels unoccupied to me,” Grace said. She entered the bedroom without hesitation. She smiled as she saw the familiar geranium sentries on the windowsill. Beyond them the window was open a few inches, letting in a subtle breeze.
Linda had made it to the doorway and was staring into the bedroom, her eyes wide, her fists clutched tightly at her sides.
“Did you open the window?” Grace asked.
“Of course I did.”
Grace looked on the far side of the old walnut wardrobe; she even opened the twin doors and looked inside. The wardrobe’s interior contained nothing but clothes on hangers. It emanated a clean, cedar scent.
“Nobody’s here,” she said reassuringly, glancing over at Linda.
She went to the closed closet door.
“Don’t—” she heard Linda say.
Sure. They’re always hiding in the closet.
Grace yanked the door open.
There was a sagging wooden rod supporting more hangered clothes. Above them on the closet shelf were cardboard shoeboxes and a stack of self-help books. Seeing that she had Linda’s full attention, Grace stuck her arm into the darkness between the clothes so she could feel around behind them in the depths of the closet, where she couldn’t see.
Her fingertips found only roughly plastered wall.
She closed the closet door and, smiling, moved toward Linda. “No lurking monsters anywhere,” she said. “Now let’s have a look in your medicine cabinet and make an inventory of what it is you’ve been taking.”
“It’s what you prescribed.”
“I’m sure. But I’m wondering about over-the-counter drugs. You take them sometimes, too, don’t you?”
“Sometimes,” Linda admitted. “To help me sleep.”
Grace took a step toward the door.
Linda hadn’t moved. “You didn’t look under the bed.”
“True enough,” Grace said.
She went to the bed, got down on her knees, and bent forward, making a show of it for Linda. She lifted the bedspread and peered into the dimness beneath the bed.
A pair of eyes stared back at her
63
It was three o’clock in the morning, already hot in a way that made the Lincoln’s windshield fog up on the inside. Renz was still at this crime scene. He’d phoned from there and given Quinn the cross streets, and remained there, waiting.
The scene was easy enough to find. Three radio cars and a CSU van were nosed in toward the curb. An unmarked blue Chevy that Quinn was sure was NYPD was parked with one tire up on the sidewalk.
A uniformed cop was stationed like a stern doorman at the building’s entrance. He directed Quinn and Pearl to an apartment on the fifth floor. The cop said it belonged to L. Brooks, which caused Quinn to stop so abruptly that the soles of his clunky black shoes made a slight squeaking sound.
A simple first initial was common among women who lived alone and didn’t want to display their gender on their mailbox.
“Linda Brooks?” he asked the uniform.
“Couldn’t tell you, sir.”
Quinn continued into the small lobby, Pearl at his heels. “Isn’t that the woman who phoned earlier?”
He nodded.
“Don’t blame yourself for this one,” Pearl said, thinking ahead. She knew how Quinn would feel about this. The Brooks woman had called him yesterday and asked for help, protection, and Quinn the great protector had put her down as another nutcase or publicity junkie.
“I blame the bastard who did it,” he said in a low, flat voice.
The apartment door was propped open with what looked like an umbrella stand. There was a certain smell wafting out into the hall, one Quinn and Pearl recognized. Death had visited here, and not long before they’d come calling.
Renz and the CSU techs were inside. Quinn and Pearl entered, careful not to get in anyone’s way.
The living room was a busy place. The techs were in there, moving in their usual choreographed fashion. They barely missed bumping into each other. A flicker of brilliance like miniature lightning illuminated the walls along a narrow hallway. Quinn knew it was a camera flash.
“The police photographer and Nift are back there with them,” Renz explained.
“Them?”
Renz ignored the question. “The killer called the Times, and had the paper call me. The guy at the Times said the killer told him he might make me a leather product like he made for you.”
“He knew about the victims’ breasts being removed?”
“That so-called secret information meant he was the real thing. That’s how he got through to me instead of being brushed off as a head case.”
“You get a voice print or phone trace?” Quinn asked.
“A voice print, yeah. But he musta made the call with one of those cheap-ass throwaway phones. I listened to a recording. The voice was normal, and so was his phrasing, like he had some education. Even apologized for waking me up. He knew about the tits being cut off. I asked him how he knew, and he told me. I asked him, ‘Did you cut off the tits this time?’ He said yeah, he did it to one of them.
“One of them. When I got here as he advised me—as if I wouldn’t have come anyway—I saw what he meant.”
Another flash from down the hall.
“Whaddya mean, ‘what he meant’?”
“C’mon,” Renz said. “I’ll show you.”
He started leading the way to the back of the apartment, then stopped and looked at Pearl. Then at Quinn.
“Jesus!” Pearl said. “I’m a cop. I’ve been to dozens of murder scenes. I’m not gonna faint or puke at the sight of a dead body.”
“Nice of you to think of her, though,” Quinn said to Renz. Not acting like yourself at all.
Renz gave his nasty fat man’s smile. “I just don’t want her upchucking all over the crime scene. Making a mess.”
When they entered the bedroom, Pearl did feel a queasiness she hadn’t expected. On the bed kneeled an almost nude dead woman in the usual hog-tied, body-bowed pose. Her wrists and ankles were wrapped and then tethered so that she was trapped
in her awkward position, body arched, staring with unseeing eyes at the ceiling. She was gagged with a rectangle of gray duct tape. Her breasts had been removed. She looked afraid but not surprised.
Next to her lay another bound woman, this one flat on her back, her arms knotted by a rope to a belt cinched tightly around her waist. It was gray cloth and looked like a woman’s belt. There was identically colored material showing in a jumble of clothes that looked as if they’d been tossed into a corner. Her ankles were tied. She’d been stabbed in the heart, and her throat had been slashed. There was surprisingly little blood, suggesting that the stab wound had been first and fatal. Near the stab wound, just above her sternum, her breasts lay spread and flaccid against her torso, still attached and apparently uninjured. As with the first woman, a rectangle of tape was plastered over her mouth.
The kneeling victim was wearing blue panties, and also appeared to have been stabbed in the heart.
Nift, who’d been poking at the hog-tied victim with something resembling a large dental pick, said, “Looks like he went for the best of the pair. This one”—he pointed at the prone woman—“has got considerably more years and mileage on her.”
“They’re not used cars,” Pearl said through clenched teeth.
“They’re pretty damn well used, though,” Nift said, absently prodding the dead hog-tied woman with the steel instrument. She didn’t object, as Pearl halfway expected she might.
The supine woman seemed to be staring at the ceiling with half closed eyes that had the stillness of marbles. Blue eyes. She had blond hair, but it was obviously dyed. She hadn’t been bad looking but was nothing special.
The hog-tied woman next to her, festooned with the familiar knife nicks of violence, had dark eyes and genuinely dark hair, and appeared to have had large breasts.
“Have you guessed which one was Linda Brooks?” Renz asked.
“The one who looks like Pearl,” Nift said, from where he knelt on the floor in a position suggesting he was about to do some gynecological examination.
Pearl started toward him, but Quinn held on to her elbow.
“Damn it, Quinn, that hurts. All I want to do is twist his head off.”
Nift smiled. “By head I presume you mean—”
“Never mind that,” Renz said.
“What about her panties?” Quinn asked.
“Same size as the last victim’s,” Nift said. He smiled. “That was the first thing I checked.”
“I’ll bet not,” Renz said. He looked at Quinn. “How do you figure the second dead woman?”
“Offhand,” Quinn said, “I’d say she happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“She probably knew the dead woman.”
“Most likely,” Quinn said. “A visiting friend.”
“Maybe he didn’t have to undress them,” Nift said. “Maybe they were getting it on together and he interrupted them.”
Pearl gave him a hard look. “Listen, you scumbag—”
Loud noises, raised voices out in the hall, made everyone in the apartment stop what he or she was doing.
Nift gave Pearl a superior little smile and stood poised and motionless with a stainless-steel implement in his right hand, like a figure in a wax museum. Part of the Famous Assholes exhibit.
There was more noise from outside, down in the street. A man’s voice yelled something Quinn couldn’t understand.
“What the hell’s going on? Quinn asked.
“That would be a media wolfpack,” Renz said, looking at his wristwatch. “The killer said he’d wait an hour so the Times could have its scoop, then he’d call the rest of the papers and television news.”
“Did he say anything else?” Pearl asked.
“Only to give his best to you,” Renz said.
It didn’t take long to identify Linda Brooks’s visitor. Her purse with identification and seventy-three dollars in it was found beneath the pile of clothes in the bedroom corner.
“A doctor,” Quinn said.
“Not just any doctor,” one of the CSU techs said. He handed a white business card to Quinn. “This was in one of the victim’s desk drawers.”
The card identified the dead woman as Dr. Grace Moore, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.
A further examination of the desk, Linda Brooks’s checkbook, and a nearby file cabinet, indicated that Dr. Grace Moore was treating Brooks, and had been for some time. There was a home file of rough and incomplete notes, but its contents, including documents signed by Grace Moore, described Brooks as a paranoid schizophrenic.
“That explains the pharmacy in the bathroom medicine cabinet,” Renz said. “The lady lived on pills.”
“I’ll send Feds to Moore’s office, see what else there is to see,” Quinn said. “No need for a warrant. Doctor-patient confidentiality doesn’t apply when both have been killed by the same madman.”
Questionable legality. Quinn was glad Jody wasn’t along on this one.
“Sounds right to me,” Renz said. “But I didn’t know you were gonna send somebody over there.”
“Send somebody?” Quinn said. “Over where?”
Renz placed his hands over both ears and turned away.
PART THREE
And to die is different from what anyone supposed,
And luckier.
—WALT WHITMAN, “Song of Myself ”
64
Leighton, Wisconsin, 1986
Time passed, and no one ever found out what really had happened to Duffy. Maybe there weren’t enough clues. Or maybe it was because no one cared. No one other than Sherri, anyway.
The road repair was finished and looked much the same, only the trees began slightly farther from the gravel shoulder. Rory wasn’t sure what drew him there, but sometimes, at night, he went alone to the spot near where he’d buried Duffy. Gotten away with murder, Sherri would say. If she knew.
He didn’t like to admit it to himself, but maybe that was something he enjoyed, having gotten away with murder. Here on this desolate stretch of road, with its nearby concealing woods and very private clearing, was the perfect spot for it.
It was also the perfect spot for secret sex. Rory had often made use of it with Sherri, once he’d gotten her past her hesitation because Duffy had died nearby. Mostly past her hesitation, anyway. She still sometimes tried to talk him into parking elsewhere for their hurried trysts, and often he’d comply. But there was something special about this remote place beneath and among the trees, with only an occasional flicker of headlights from passing traffic as a reminder of the outside world. Things happened as usual out there. Not in here, to Sherri. Not to Rory.
Sex was definitely better here.
And so was quiet contemplation.
Rory wasn’t the only one who appreciated this secluded area. Alone there one moonlit night, he’d parked the car out of sight among the trees, and was standing and smoking a cigarette, when he heard the sound of a car stopping on the gravel shoulder. He moved farther back into the woods and waited.
Tires crunched louder on gravel, and he saw the dark shape of a car with its lights out moving slowly to where it wouldn’t be seen from the road.
Rory smiled. Somebody parking here to make out, probably. And Rory’s car was parked where it couldn’t be seen. Should he stay and watch? Was he a Peeping Tom as well as a dog slayer?
He saw the dark form of a slender man—or maybe a teenage boy—in jeans and a dark T-shirt—get out of the car, walk around to the back of the vehicle, and open the trunk.
He removed a nude, bound woman and laid her gently on the ground, then stood with his hands on his hips and glanced around. His gaze traveled smoothly past Rory, who was standing in shock, well concealed in the deep shadows.
Rory became aware that he was breathing heavily. He swallowed so loudly he was actually afraid the man might hear. Motionless, he watched transfixed, as if he were seeing a movie scene unfold.
The driver of the dark car had set to work. He bent over the de
ad or unconscious woman, untied her, then rearranged her body, making sure that her legs were bound tightly with rope. Then he propped her in a kneeling position, looped rope around her elbows behind her back, and pressed her upper body backward so her spine was drawn like a bow and she was staring up at the stars where she might point an arrow. Her eyes were open wide, focused upward as if seeking some message of hope. So she wasn’t dead. Even from this distance Rory saw her blink and move her head slightly. The man pressed something, some kind of tape, over her mouth and unreeled it and fastened it behind her head. Rory could barely hear her making desperate humming noises, trying to shake her head from side to side. But so tight was the tape and the tension of her bound body that she was barely able to move her head, and completely unable to move anything else other than her fingers, which writhed and flexed in search of any sort of tactile contact. She was seeking anything that she could touch, grip, hold on to. But nothing was within reach.
Rory’s heart was pounding and his mouth was dry, and he couldn’t stop watching. He knew he should yell, or go get the cops, or do anything that might help this young woman. It wasn’t going to happen.
He could see that she was attractive, with bountiful breasts and long black hair. Dark eyes fixed in an expression of sheer horror. Her frantic attempts to move caused her breasts to jiggle slightly, which seemed to amuse the man, because he briefly cupped one in his hand and pinched the nipple. The frightened humming grew slightly louder. Rory was aware that he had an erection. He had to do something. But he couldn’t budge. He was as immobilized as the woman in the clearing. Even if he wanted to take some sort of action, he knew his limbs wouldn’t respond.
He couldn’t stop watching.
Not even when a knife glinted in the moonlight and there was little doubt about what was going to happen.
The man squatted beside the woman. He was wearing a cap with a bill, and Rory couldn’t make out his features, but he was smiling as he held the blade so it glinted in the moonlight before the woman’s face. No part of her moved other than her horrified eyes, which rolled wildly.