by John Lutz
“I think you did,” Jody answered, and found she had to move fast to keep up with her grandmother, who walked surprisingly fast for a woman with a cane.
The office’s air-conditioning unit was humming and rattling away, making phone conversations private. Fedderman wouldn’t be disturbed by Quinn speaking in a normal conversational voice.
“Whaddya got, Sal?”
“Victim’s full name is Deena Maureen Vess,” said Sal’s gravelly voice. “Neighbors say she worked at Roller Steak. That’s a restaurant where the servers zip around on skates while they juggle the food. Deena had a collision and broke her ankle. They liked her at Roller Steak and were holding her job for her.”
“She have any special friends at the restaurant?”
“Naw. She’d only been there a few weeks.”
“Love can be capricious,” Quinn said.
“From what we heard, there was no capriciousness there with Deena. At least we know now what the roller-skate key on the body meant. The killer’s sick joke.”
“Nift mentioned at the crime scene that he probably used the ankle to torture her. That’d be broken bone end against broken bone end. He might have thought that was funny, too.”
“Holy crap! We do need to catch this guy. What do you want for me and Harold to do now?”
“Have some lunch, then chat again with Deena’s neighbors. Widen your canvass. See if there’s anywhere in the area where the killer might have bought a roller-skate key. You don’t see many, if any, people using the kind of skates that require a key these days. There can’t be that many places where they’re sold.”
“Nift call with any more info from the lab?”
“I’m still waiting,” Quinn said.
He didn’t have long to wait. A few minutes after his conversation with Sal, the desk phone rang. Caller ID said it was the morgue. Nift.
“Like we thought,” Nift said, “the murder weapon was almost surely the same knife used on the last victim. She was tortured with small, painful stab wounds, and apparently by rubbing the ends of her broken ankle bones together. Looks like the ankle was broken several days ago, then reinjured. As if he struck her with something there, maybe kicked her.”
“What about the rope and duct tape?”
“Both common brands, not traceable. The tape is probably off the same roll as last time. It appears to have been firmly sealed over her mouth all through her ordeal.”
Her silent ordeal.
Quinn thought that must have been the most terrible kind of loneliness.
“Her breasts never did turn up at the crime scene,” Nift said. “They were sliced off antemortem, as with the earlier victims. He likes his victims alive when he separates their breasts from their bodies.”
“Was it done fast or slow?”
“I can’t tell for sure, Quinn, but I can guess. So can you.”
“He’d want to take his time.”
“That’s what I’d do.”
Quinn could hardly believe what he’d just heard. But that was often the way with Nift. “Why does he want them?” Quinn asked, trying to assume the same sick mind-set as the killer’s. “What does he do with them?”
“I don’t know, but they were obviously a great set. You can easily judge by the cut patterns, and what little is left.”
“ You can tell,” Quinn said, feeling a little queasy.
“Well, I’m a professional.” Nift was silent for a moment. There was a sound as if he might be shuffling through some papers. “No indications that the victim struggled. No flesh caught beneath her nails. And there were no lacerations other than those made deliberately by the killer. Looks like she didn’t so much as scratch him.”
“That’s too bad,” Quinn said.
“No indication of recent sexual intercourse.”
“Except maybe with himself.”
“No indication of that, either. This killer is a perfectionist.” Nift said. “He leaves nothing behind he doesn’t want to leave.”
“Everybody eventually overlooks something,” Quinn said. “We just have to find it.”
“So they say on the TV cop shows.”
“And they always end well,” Quinn said.
“Sooner or later they get canceled. Tell Pearl I said hello.”
“I think not,” Quinn said, but Nift had hung up.
Over dinner in the brownstone that evening, Jody didn’t mention her conversation with her grandmother. She didn’t understand why it should be kept secret, but her grandmother had extracted a sworn oath that their conversations would remain private and special. Jody, who had never had a best friend, agreed.
She did tell Quinn and Pearl about her conversation with Joseph Coil.
They both listened attentively. Pearl speared a bite of salad and considered while she chewed and swallowed.
“What Coil told you about the total malleability of the law,” she said, after washing the salad down with a sip of wine, “is bullshit.”
“Unfortunately,” Quinn said, looking across the table at Jody, “I think Coil is right.”
Jody leaned back in her chair and sipped her wine, regarding them. The gray head of Snitch the cat became visible above tabletop level. Snitch squinted at Quinn and seemed prepared to stare him down. Quinn realized Snitch might have been in Jody’s lap all through dinner.
“You guys are a lot of help,” Jody said.
“We try,” both Quinn and Pearl said almost simultaneously.
Jody grinned. “And I appreciate it.” She sat forward again. Snitch’s head disappeared. “Do you have any more information about the vic?”
“That depends,” Quinn said, “on whether you want dessert.”
38
Leighton, Wisconsin, 1986
R ory was slouched behind the steering wheel of his mom’s Impala, about to turn onto the county road near Cheever’s Hardware, when he saw one of the posters. It was tacked to a telephone pole and headed MISSING in large black letters, and beneath that was a photo of a shaggy dog as black as the letters.
At first Rory felt no connection with the poster, so deep into a corner of his mind had he pushed the night he’d struck the dog and buried it. After putting the poor animal out of its misery, he reminded himself. The humane thing to do.
He couldn’t help it. The sequence of events that night flashed through his brain. How and why they had occurred. What they meant.
No, there was nothing he’d do differently after the car had struck the dog. His actions had been harsh but right.
A horn blasted as he almost ran a stop sign.
He felt a stab of panic. He wasn’t supposed to be in the car. If his mother for some reason left her book club and found out he’d borrowed it and was driving without a license again, she’d be plenty mad.
The man in the pickup truck that crossed the intersection ahead of him glared at Rory and gunned his engine. Rory felt no surge of anger, only worry about his mom turning up and ruining his day. But he’d already figured the odds of that happening and accepted them before getting into the car. So he stopped worrying about his mom. It wasn’t logical. He again concentrated on the dog incident.
He pulled the car to the road shoulder and put the transmission in park. He’d assumed he’d never have to think about the dog again, but obviously he did. The owner was going to be proactive.
So where does that leave me? How should I feel?
No, the question isn’t about how I feel. What should I do?
The answer came immediately: nothing.
The dog, with its head crushed by a rock, hadn’t been found (which was how he’d planned it). There would be nothing that might publicly connect the dog with him, even if it was found (which was how he’d planned it). The owner missed the dog (no surprise) and was tacking up M ISSING D OG posters all over town (should be no surprise).
Logical course of action? Forget about the dog incident again-except when you have to look at one of the damned posters.
He smiled. This
new development, the possibility of which he should have foreseen, posed no danger whatsoever. His initial reasoning, and his actions, had been correct. Nothing fundamental had changed.
Rory put the Chevy in drive, glanced in the rearview mirror and then over his shoulder, and pulled the vehicle back onto the road.
He glanced at the dashboard clock. His mother’s book club would be ending in half an hour, which meant he could safely drive another twenty minutes.
He drove down High Street, in the general direction of his house. A few people were walking along the sidewalks, going in and out of the shops, despite the temperature pushing ninety.
Rory settled back into the soft upholstery and steered with one wrist draped over the wheel. The air conditioner worked well; the motor was smooth, and there were no rattles. He pressed the radio buttons until he found some rap, then turned up the volume.
And saw the girl tacking up a MISSING DOG poster.
He recognized her immediately and slowed the car, staring at the way the breeze pressed the material of her blouse and slacks against one side of her body, the way her back arched as she held the poster high with one hand and hammered with the other, how her dark ponytail swayed slightly as the breeze blew and she worked her arm to drive the nail into the wooden telephone pole. It was a pole pecked with dozens of nail holes from notices of garage sales or other missing-pet appeals. There was a canvas bag at her feet that probably held more posters. Rory was in love with her, and she… well, she liked him. No, she more than just liked him, he was sure. He hoped. Sherri Klinger was her name. The more he repeated it to himself, the more he found it oddly melodious.
She was in advanced studies, smart like him. He could talk to her and she understood. And he understood and agreed with almost everything she said.
He hadn’t known she owned a dog.
When the car slowed to a complete stop just behind her, she turned and recognized Rory. She dropped the hammer into the canvas bag, picked up the bag by its strap, and walked smiling toward the car.
He switched off the radio, then held down the button to drop the window.
“Rory,” she said, leaning down to look at him. She seemed glad to see him. “Don’t you know you’re too young to drive?”
Rory gave her what he thought of as his dynamite grin. “Too young for a lotta things I do.”
“I’ll just bet.” Her face, which he thought about so often before he slept, became serious. “You haven’t seen Duffy, have you?”
“Don’t know him.”
“My dog, dumb-ass.”
“That him on the poster?”
“Good guess.”
“Haven’t seen him.” How easy it is to lie, when you know it’s saving someone you love from pain. “He run away?”
“Yeah. It’s not the first time. But it’s the first time he didn’t come back.”
How much more terrible she’d feel if I told her the truth. “And now you’re going around town tacking up posters.”
“That was the last one.” She motioned with her head toward the poster on the phone pole.
“Wanna drive around for a while and look for Duffy?”
“I dunno.”
“I’ve got a little bit of time before I have to get the car back.”
“Your mom even know you’ve got it?”
“Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.”
She grinned.
“Hop in,” Rory said. “For Duffy.”
“For Duffy,” she repeated. She hitched the canvas bag’s strap over her shoulder and walked around the front of the car to get in.
He watched her walk, the way her hair flounced, the subtle rhythmic sway of her breasts, feeling a mixture of desire and satisfaction.
This dog-poster thing, he’d turned it his way.
39
New York, the present
N eeve Cooper sat alone on a bench in Central Park and read more manuscript pages of Overbite, the vampire novel Paranormal Books, a small publisher, had assigned her.
She wielded a sharp red pencil in her right hand and from time to time made a mark or jotted a message on the pages. Whatever she penciled had to be legible. This would be published as an e-book, but also in audio and print forms. Her editing would find its way into all formats.
For almost five years Neeve had been an associate editor at Noir and More, a publishing house with offices on Hudson Street. Then Noir and More had been bought (absorbed, the execs liked to say) by Schmelder and Kott, a large German publisher and distributor of skiing equipment. The problem was that half the Noir and More employees, including Neeve, hadn’t been absorbed with the rest of the company.
So she had become a freelance editor, copyediting manuscripts for publishers that, like Noir and More, were short of employees during this hard time for publishers. Neeve considered herself lucky to have hooked up for freelance work with Paranormal. She could make enough to eat and pay the rent, but she sure got tired of reading about vampires and zombies. Her book before this one had been about a vampire cat. The worst part was, halfway through, she found herself enjoying the damned thing.
She glanced at her watch, then took off her reading glasses and brushed back the lock of long dark hair hanging down one cheek. She was a pretty, brown-eyed woman in her mid-thirties who looked younger and had at one time considered pursuing a career in ballet. She had the powerful, lithe body for ballet, and the balance. Then she’d been horrified to find that she was growing boobs, and large ones that the other girls envied. But those girls didn’t want to be ballet dancers. Neeve had considered surgical reduction, but her mother said that was insane, and besides, she’d known women who’d had breast reduction and their breasts had grown large again.
At eighteen, Neeve was finished as a ballet dancer. She enrolled in college and pursued an English degree.
Some of the grace from her ballet days showed as she bent effortlessly and stuffed the rubber-banded vampire manuscript into the computer case on the ground. Neeve used the case for print manuscripts (it was the perfect size unless they ran over six hundred pages). She draped the case over her shoulder by its padded strap, then picked up her knockoff Gucci purse and stood up from the bench. Several people observed her walk away. A few of the men seemed hypnotized. It was like watching a dance.
Neeve knew she’d have to hurry to get to the Pig in a Poke restaurant on time. She was meeting three friends there at twelve-thirty, which was only fifteen minutes away. She lengthened her stride and her legs seemed long even in her flat-soled jogging shoes. The long stride emphasized the artful turn of her ankles and the musculature of her calves. Some shape on this woman.
At the first intersection outside the park she had to stop with a knot of other people to wait for the walk light. She noticed she was breathing hard. Out of condition.
It also occurred to her that she didn’t have to hurry. If she was half an hour late, her friends would still be there. This wasn’t a business lunch of the sort she’d gotten so used to at Noir and More. There was no need to be on time. She was self-employed, and that carried with it some definite advantages.
She walked slower and smiled. Self — employed. In business for herself, by herself.
The future was uncertain, but she’d been getting enough work lately. Reading vampire novels wasn’t all that bad. And one of the large publishers had agreed to e-mail their manuscripts to Neeve, which meant she could use the editing software on her computer. This lugging around of pounds and pounds of paper would cease, and she could still get out of the apartment from time to time. She could take her laptop with her. It wasn’t half as heavy as a text-on-paper manuscript.
Neeve tried to think around her trepidation and the moodiness she’d fallen into. She decided she could use a little uncertainty and adventure in her life. Publishing was changing, and no one could predict exactly how. Once she learned to get used to the uneasiness that accompanied that situation, she might learn to enjoy the world of the freelancer. Ma
ybe this was one of those times when opportunity visited in disguise.
Suddenly Overbite didn’t seem so heavy.
The Alfred A. Aal Memorial Library smelled exactly as a library should-of perspiration-infused wood and old books. It was also suitably hushed.
“We don’t have to be as careful about Ms. Culver as we used to,” Penny said to Feds, after he’d timed pecking her on the cheek when the chief librarian was looking the other way. “She’s depressed these days.”
“Too bad,” Fedderman said. “Library business down?”
“You could describe it that way. She’s worried about e-books.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“It isn’t funny, Feds. It would be like you being edged out of work by robotic cops.”
“That’s already happening.” He glanced toward the front of the library and the distraught Ms. Culver. “She should have learned by now to deal with progress. And libraries aren’t going to simply disappear overnight because all of a sudden some people are reading books on little screens. She needs to lighten up, for her own good.”
“Ms. Culver tends to catastrophize,” Penny said.
“Is that a word?”
“It is now. It might not make much sense for her to build what is a very real problem into some kind of dilemma, but everybody has a pet issue.”
“It can be that way in my work. With Quinn. He doesn’t catastrophize, but he sure gets obsessed with the job. He kind of locks in, not so unlike Ms. Culver.”
“Speaking of your job, I saw in the news that a patrolman was shot to death by a car thief in the Village last night.”
“Young guy named Messerschmitt,” Fedderman said. “Been on the job less than a year.”
“Was he married?”
Fedderman figured Penny already knew the answer to that one. He was getting used to her methodology. “Married and with an infant son,” he said.
“See what I mean about being a cop’s wife?” Penny said. “I don’t even know this woman and I broke out crying when I saw that on TV news. I found myself identifying with her.”