Mister X fq-5

by John Lutz

  She hadn’t seen him yet and was watching the other skateboarder, who’d shot far ahead. The killer noticed with satisfaction that she was holding a bag of popcorn identical to his.

  Her clothes were more casual today-jeans, sandals, a red T-shirt with FDNY printed on it. She was small, narrow-waisted, and busty. Her long dark hair had a slight wave in it. Like Pearl’s.

  She saw him and paused, pretending, he was sure, that she was surprised. He knew then that she’d thought he might be here. That she’d come hoping he was here. There was a tingling satisfaction and anticipation in his mind and body, as if he were a fisherman whose hook had just set. The fun part was ahead.

  She continued to the bench and sat down, not on the opposite end but about two feet away from him. She hadn’t completely lost her expression of surprise. “Small park,” she said.

  He smiled. “Wouldn’t want to mow it.”

  Her laugh was music. “That joke has a familiar ring to it.”

  “Happens every spring,” he said.

  She opened the paper sack she was carrying and began tossing popcorn out onto the bare earth and littered pavement in front of the bench. As before, pigeons magically appeared.

  When a squirrel came close, she stopped throwing popcorn. She bent low, picked up a small pebble, and threw it in the direction of the squirrel, deliberately missing it but scaring it away.

  “Not a fan of squirrels?” he asked.

  “No. They scare away the pigeons.”

  “Some people think they’re cute.”

  “I’m not one of them. Squirrels are rats with decorative tails.”

  “I agree.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I agree with everything you say. That’s so you might have lunch with me, Elana.”

  With the squirrel observing from about fifty feet away, she began tossing popcorn again. “You remembered my name.”

  “It’s the most beautiful name I ever heard.”

  “That’s Maria.”

  “No, no. It’s Elana. I once met a girl named Elana.” He put on a horror-stricken expression. “You forgot my name!”

  “Gerald Lone,” she said.

  “Wow! After two days. That must mean you’ll have lunch with me.”

  “After the pigeons are finished eating.”

  “Fair enough, especially for the pigeons.” He reached into his paper sack and, like Elana, began feeding the insatiable birds. “Are you on your lunch hour?” he asked.

  She shook her head no. “Like a lot of other people in this city, I’m between jobs.”

  “Firefighter?” He pointed at the T-shirt lettering distorted by her oversized breasts.

  “No,” she said. “Just a fan.”

  “So am I.”

  “What about you?” she asked. “Are you gainfully employed?”

  “I’m in software. That means I have to travel a lot. What was-or I guess I mean what is-your field?”

  “Accounting. I was junior accountant for a chain of shoe stores. When they cut expenses, I was one of them.”

  “Heels. They should have kept you around just to look at.”

  She gave him a phony demure look and giggled.

  “Women aren’t supposed to be good at math,” he said.

  Now her look was anything but demure. “I’m good at lots of things women aren’t supposed to be good at.” Playing him while he was playing her. Not knowing he was way, way out of her league. He was going to enjoy this.

  He smiled at her. “Isn’t that bag about empty?”

  She grinned and dumped the remaining popcorn onto the ground. He did the same with his popcorn.

  He knew this was going to work. This was going to work just fine.

  As they strolled from the park, they crumpled the popcorn bags and dropped them into a trash receptacle. They walked closer together. Both of them knocked salt from their fingers by brushing their hands together, as if in strange, hushed applause to celebrate the end of loneliness.

  Behind them the pigeons went into a feeding frenzy, and the squirrel returned.

  69

  “Let me get this straight,” Ed Archer/Keller said, when Quinn had contacted him via Archer’s cell phone. “You want me to come to New York and register at a hotel under the name Edward Keller? And then you want to let it be known that I’m there?”

  “It’s a simple request,” Quinn said. “Since Keller is your real name.”

  Silence for a few seconds. Then: “That’s not exactly a state secret.”

  “It is in your state. And in your city. Where you’re in business and have political ambitions.”

  “This is beginning to sound a lot like blackmail, Detective���Quinn, is it?”

  “It is. And I wasn’t thinking so much in terms of blackmail as in asking a father to help his daughter find safety in a dangerous situation.”

  “Daughter?”

  “Chrissie Keller. We’ve been unable to locate her.”

  “You’ve been speaking to Erin, my ex-wife. That’s where you got my number.”

  “I’d assumed she told you I was going to call.”

  “No, I haven’t heard from her. She’s in Ohio.”

  “Erin’s in New York,” Quinn said. “Doing what a good mother should do. And a good father. Trying to protect her daughter.”

  “Chrissie’s really missing?”

  “Yes. She came to New York to find help in bringing the killer of your other daughter to justice.”

  “Jesus!” Keller said. “You do know a lot about me.”

  “Enough for my purposes,” Quinn said.

  Let the bastard know he’s between a rock and a rock.

  “This is a rotten thing you’re doing,” Keller said. “You’re mucking around in a world I left behind. I even legally changed my name, built another life. Now you’re threatening to rip it all apart if I don’t cooperate in some kind of impersonation of my old self.”

  “Your true self,” Quinn said. “I’m giving you a chance to be a real father. To stick your neck out for your daughter.”

  “What’s the neck-sticking-out part?”

  “She’s a suspect in several murders,” Quinn said.

  “Come off it! Chrissie?”

  “The same.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Of course not. She’s your daughter. And you might be right. She might be innocent. But either way, you can help her. We think if you come to New York and she finds out about you being here, she’ll come to you.”

  It took Keller a few seconds to process that. “And when that happens you can apprehend her. You’re using me as bait.”

  “I can’t argue with that assessment.”

  “Listen, Quinn, this is almost like you asking me to do this for a stranger. After Tiffany was killed���well, everything came apart. For me, for my wife, for Chrissie. We all wanted, needed, new and separate lives. For all of us, the past is poison. Apparently more so for Chrissie than for anyone else. You don’t understand what you’re asking of me.”

  Quinn considered bringing up the child molestation, but thought better of it. The police would need Keller’s cooperation, so let Erin call and put the knife in him and twist it.

  “I know what I’m asking,” Quinn said. “And I know that once you’ve weighed your options you’ll comply.”

  “I need to think about this,” Keller said.

  “That sounds reasonable, but the sooner you say yes, the better for everyone-especially Chrissie. I need to know tomorrow. I’ll give you my number to call.”

  “I have it on my cell phone from your call,” Keller said.

  “Fine. I expect to hear from you by three o’clock.”

  But Keller had broken the connection.

  Quinn wasn’t dissatisfied with the call. He knew Keller would come around eventually. But he didn’t want eventually to be too eventual. He pecked out Erin’s cell phone number.

  She answered immediately.

  When Quinn desc
ribed his conversation with Keller, she laughed in an ugly way that was so acidic Quinn thought the phone might melt in his hand.

  “I’ll call him,” she said. “I’ll put that bastard right back in the poisonous past and then yank him into the poisonous present. And I’ll remind him he helped create them both. He’ll do as we ask, if he doesn’t want his spiffy new life and his standing in the community shoved right up his ass.”

  “Just be sure to let me know-”

  Quinn realized Erin had abruptly broken the connection, just as Keller had done earlier.

  Maybe it was a family thing.

  Quinn had just finished hanging up after his conversation with Erin when Pearl called from the hospital.

  “Lisa Bolt checked herself out of here an hour before I arrived,” she said.

  Quinn opened his desk drawer and reached for a cellophane-wrapped cigar. “Say again, Pearl.” Anger sizzled in his voice.

  “You heard me the first time, Quinn.”

  “What time exactly did she leave?”

  “Hospital records have her leaving at eleven thirty-one.”

  Half an hour after you were supposed to be at the hospital. Are you slipping, Pearl? Is it grief over Yancy, or something more?

  Only because of Yancy, Quinn didn’t ask Pearl why she’d been late. “Why did the hospital let her leave?”

  “They couldn’t stop her. They say she’s well enough anyway.”

  “What about the uniforms who were supposed to be guarding her?”

  “She waited until they were between shifts and yakking away down the hall by the coffee machine. They figured it’d be okay for a minute or two because they were between her room and the elevators. She must’ve taken the stairs down a floor before getting on an elevator. The uniforms couldn’t have made her stay, even if they’d been there to try.”

  “Didn’t it occur to them that somebody might have come up the stairs to get to her?”

  “I’m sure they’ve been asked that question.”

  “Did she leave with anyone?”

  “No. I’m told she got into a cab.”

  “Does the hospital have an address or contact number where she can be reached?”

  “Address is an apartment in the West Nineties. Phone number’s to a pet shop on Amsterdam.”

  “Would it be safe to say she’s missing again?” Quinn asked, keeping his anger on simmer.

  “Unless she’s turned into a puppy. I’ll check out the pet shop and the apartment address and let you know.”

  “There won’t be an apartment at that address. Or if there is, it won’t have anything to do with Lisa Bolt.”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  “Are we in the wrong business?” Quinn asked, looking at the wrapped cigar and changing his mind about lighting it.

  “It’s the only business we know.”

  “Sometimes I don’t think we know it very well.”

  “It’s hard to keep strings attached to people who don’t want it that way,” Pearl said. “Stop being critical of yourself and kicking yourself in the ass.”

  “I was being critical of you, Pearl. Kicking you in the ass.”

  “Oh. Well, that won’t work.”

  70

  Quinn stopped at the Lotus Diner the next morning and had a breakfast of eggs, toast, and coffee. He read the Times over a second cup of coffee and then read a City Beat he’d gotten out of a machine down the street.

  He wasn’t surprised when he saw the headline: SHADOW WOMAN OUT OF HOSPITAL. The piece went on to say how Lisa Bolt, strongly suspected of being the so-called “shadow woman” in the Carver murder investigation, had checked herself out of the hospital and again dropped from sight. A certain little NYPD bird had informed the reporter (Cindy Sellers, according to the byline) that the police had no way to guard Lisa Bolt around the clock, nor could they legally hold her if she decided to check out. Sellers went on to say that it was still a free country, for the most part, and even someone of interest to the police could come and go as they pleased.

  All of this deliberately downplayed the momentary negligence of the NYPD uniforms assigned to keep watch on Lisa Bolt. That was to lessen the embarrassment of the department and of Renz in particular. Renz was, Quinn had no doubt, the talkative little NYPD bird.

  How did it happen, Quinn asked himself, as he laid the folded paper aside in a puddle made by his water glass, that both he and Renz were indebted to Cindy Sellers? She could obtain information from either source and then cross-check it with the other. The opportunistic muckraker must have been born making a deal.

  Quinn glanced around and decided the diner was too crowded for him to make a call on his cell phone and not be overheard. He slid from the booth and handed enough money for breakfast and a tip to Thel the waitress.

  “In a rush, Captain Quinn?” she asked, slipping the bills into her apron pocket.

  “Always,” Quinn said.

  “Somebody being murdered?”

  “Always.”

  “Want a coffee to go?”

  “Al-”

  “Never mind,” Thel said.

  He walked back to the counter with her and waited while she filled a white foam cup full of coffee and fitted it with a tight plastic lid. He accepted it and thanked her. “Thel,” he reminded her, “I’m no longer a police captain.”

  “In my mind,” she said, “always.”

  Outside the diner, he strode through the warm morning and the sweet spoiled smells of trash waiting to be collected, to where the Lincoln was illegally parked with his NYPD placard on the visor. Inside the car, he placed his steaming cup in a holder and watched the windows immediately begin to fog up. It was time to play dumb. Or at least uninformed. He pecked out Cindy Sellers’s direct number.

  “It’s your other little bird,” he mumbled impatiently, waiting for her to pick up. She must know from caller ID who was on the other end of the connection.

  When she did pick up, she said, “What’ve you got, Quinn?”

  “Lisa Bolt checked herself out of the hospital yesterday. She’s in the wind again.”

  Cindy let a few moments pass before replying. “You read City Beat this morning?”

  “Haven’t had time,” Quinn lied.

  “Pick up a copy and read it. Learn all about Lisa Bolt checking out of the hospital and dropping from sight again. The shadow woman’s back in the shadows. If she really is the shadow woman. You gotta do better, Quinn. You got scooped on this one.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Sure am.”

  “Damn!” Quinn said.

  When he got to the office, Pearl was already at her desk. Her coffee mug was steaming away alongside her computer, and he realized he’d left his to-go cup in the car.

  “Renz dropped a word in Cindy Sellers’s ear already,” he said, sitting down behind his desk and swiveling the chair this way and that as if to fasten it firmer to the floor. “Doing damage control.”

  “No surprise,” Pearl said, eyes still on her computer monitor as she maneuvered and clicked her mouse.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  “World of knowledge, but none of it any help.”

  Quinn got up, walked over to the brewer, and poured some coffee into his initialed mug. He was returning to his desk when Fedderman walked in. He looked overheated and rumpled already, and it was still three hours till noon.

  “The windows on your car are all steamed up,” he said to Quinn. “Looks like just the place to lose the crease in your trousers.”

  Quinn nodded. “Been having trouble with that,” he said, not wanting to explain, thinking nobody but Fedderman still said trousers.

  He settled back down in his desk chair with his coffee. Sipped. Yuk!

  “Erin’s got form,” Pearl said.

  Quinn and Fedderman looked at her.

  “Not the kinda form you guys are dreaming about,” Pearl said. “She got into trouble in a little town in Florida twelve years ago when she was on vacation with
her girls. Assault charge. A small-town cop pulled her over for speeding, and they got into a spat. Erin broke his nose.”

  “She doesn’t seem the type,” Fedderman said.

  Pearl smiled at him. “She said it was self-defense, that she was trying to push him away and hit him accidentally.”

  “While she was swinging at him,” Quinn said.

  “Twelve years ago,” Fedderman said. “And it could have happened to anybody. Doesn’t mean much now.”

  “You’re cutting her a lot of slack,” Pearl said.

  “Jesus, Pearl! She lost a daughter to a monster. You don’t understand how that feels.”

  “I think I might,” Pearl said.

  Fedderman sighed. “I’m sorry, Pearl. I mean, about Yancy.”

  Pearl’s eyes teared up, and Quinn thought she might leave her desk to go into the half bath, or at least use a tissue. She simply continued working her computer, maybe reading more about the old assault charge. Tough Pearl. Quinn felt a swelling admiration for her.

  His desk phone rang. As he leaned forward to reach for the receiver he glanced at caller ID and recognized Edward Archer’s cell phone number.

  “Mr. Keller,” he said, when he picked up.

  “Archer,” Keller corrected. “Until I get to New York. That’s part of the deal.”

  “There’s a deal, Mr. Keller?”

  “I’ll rearrange my schedule and fly in to LaGuardia tomorrow morning.”

  “That would be fine.”

  “How long will I be staying?”

  “That’s impossible to say. Bring plenty of clothes.”

  “You don’t make it easy.”

  “It isn’t going to be easy. It’s what you should do.”

  “Have to do,” Keller said. “Where do you want me to stay?”

  “The Belington Midtown. It’s on Twenty-fourth Street.”

  “That isn’t Midtown.”

  “Few things are what they seem,” Quinn said. “Remember to check in as Edward Keller. I’ll be in touch.”

  “I don’t want Chrissie harmed,” Keller said. “That’s why I’m doing this.”

  “Of course.”

  Quinn hung up on Keller before Keller’s cell phone could be shut off. It felt good.

  “We’ve got him,” he said, thinking, Thank you, Erin Keller.