by John Lutz
This wasn’t the time to take risks. There was no reason to prod the increasingly muddled mind he was making uneasy, or to stir the will he would soon break. This hobby-oh well, obsession-of his fascinated in part because it always became a joint venture. Eventually his quarry would long for the suspense to end, and would join in the process.
Standing in the hall outside Dr. Grace Moore’s office door, he’d decided to have a drink at the bar in the hotel next door, and then go to Linda’s apartment while she was still on the couch-if her analyst actually used a couch-and rearrange some things in her refrigerator and medicine chest. Not drastically, but unmistakably, so she’d strongly suspect-but not know — that someone had been in her apartment during her absence.
He could picture her, still rattled by what she’d seen in the fridge, standing in front of the rearranged medicine cabinet where she’d gone to take one of her tranquilizers, and seeing the bottle of pills for some reason resting on the wrong shelf-and upside down. How soon she’d be off the track, almost immediately after a session with the good doctor. It would be enough to shake her faith in science.
He paid for his drink and dismounted his bar stool, then left the hotel and had the doorman hail a cab.
As he gave the driver a cross-street destination, he thought he might spend a little time in Linda’s apartment, go through some of her papers and perhaps find out why she was seeing a shrink. She’d be on the couch (if Dr. Grace Moore used a couch) at least another half hour or so, and it would take her a while to arrive even if she came straight home.
“Keep in touch with Quinn and Q and A,” Harley Renz told Nancy Weaver, “but I’ve got something else important, and confidential, I want you to do.”
Nancy Weaver, seated in one of the chairs angled toward Renz’s desk in the commissioner’s office, was keenly interested. And alert. She didn’t actually trust Renz. Not all the way. He’d sacrifice her in an NYPD minute if it suited his purpose. He was a valuable but tricky ally.
Knowing when to keep her mouth shut, Weaver waited silently for Renz to continue.
“There’s an undercover cop named Tennyson, working Vice in Midtown right now.”
Weaver came up with the vague image of a tall, lanky cop. “Jim Tennyson?”
“Yeah. You know him?”
“Seen him around, is all.”
“Would he recognize you?”
“I doubt it.”
“Take precautions anyway.”
Weaver waited again, seemingly unconcerned. Renz would make known what sorts of precautions were necessary.
“I want you to put a loose tail on Tennyson, find out where he goes, who he sees. You’re going to have to be careful. He crosses paths with some pretty mean assholes.”
“When you say put a loose tail…”
“I mean you by yourself, Weaver. And whatever you learn, you’ll share with me and no one else. It’ll be worth your while.”
Weaver was sure of that. She also knew it would be a bad idea to refuse the commissioner’s request. Renz would slit his grandmother’s throat if it might help him in his relentless bureaucratic climb. No, it was a political climb now. Even better, if Weaver stayed on Renz’s good side. Especially if she learned something about him that made him vulnerable.
If she had something on him that made him have to trust her, she knew it could go one of two ways: her future would be secured, or he would destroy her so she’d no longer be a potential danger to him.
It was a rough game she was playing.
“I understand the necessity for confidentiality, sir. You can trust me.”
“I know I can, Weaver, or you wouldn’t be sitting here.”
Their gazes locked and something passed between them, an unspoken understanding between takers but not givers. The only two types of humans on this earth. Or at least in the city of New York.
Renz made a tent of his pudgy fingers and said nothing more, so Weaver stood up to leave.
“Do what you have to do,” he said behind her.
She nodded.
Story of my life.
Concrete walls bearing indecipherable graffiti, steep grades overgrown with weeds, cars moving along on trackside roadways, all flashed past the window wherein the killer could see his somber reflection.
He was on the train back into New York City from Stamford, Connecticut. It was only a forty-five-minute commute, and it had taken less than an hour to visit a hardware store in Stamford where duplicate keys were made.
He’d had to do this. There was no certitude. Linda Brooks might at any time remove her spare door key from beneath the welcome mat outside her apartment door and change her locks. If she was seeing an analyst, she might well receive that very sound advice.
He’d explained to the girl behind the hardware counter that he had to leave the original key with his wife so she could come and go in his absence, but he’d made a wax impression of their house key. Could she duplicate it?
Of course she could, but it would cost more than a simple reproduction.
He gladly paid the extra charge.
While the key was being made, he browsed around the store and bought a kit for hanging pictures. Let the girl working the key machine, who also had checked him out, draw her own conclusions about him and his fictitious wife moving or redecorating.
He was soon out of the hardware store and on his way back to the train station, a copy of Linda Brooks’s door key in a small envelope deep in his pocket.
He knew that having the key, feeling its warm, light weight and presence against his thigh, hastened the date when it would be used for the last time.
The train slowed and took on passengers at one of its stops along the way. Then it picked up speed again and rocketed along the rails toward the city and Linda Brooks and her destiny.
57
U sually Linda Brooks wandered, walking the streets as if she might stumble across some answer there.
The killer sometimes thought her meanderings matched the random madness of her mind. It made her more interesting to follow. His projections of where she was headed were usually wrong, not from any fault of his own, but because her mind was a fickle navigator.
But today was different. Linda was walking faster and in straight lines, her chin thrust forward. Today she conveyed an obvious sense of purpose that was almost caricature.
The killer easily followed her without being seen. She didn’t glance behind her once, as she usually did. Her focus was forward.
She crossed Amsterdam and strode north on Columbus, headed for the Upper West Side. The killer almost had to struggle to keep up.
When they reached West Seventy-ninth Street he realized where she was going. He hung back and watched her pause, and then enter the redbrick and stone building that housed Quinn and Associates Investigations.
Quinn heard the street door, then the office door, and watched from behind his desk as the woman entered. She had long dark hair, and was medium height and slender. Standing framed in the doorway as she was, in her tight jeans and yellow T-shirt, he couldn’t help but notice she was buxom. The T-shirt was lettered MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS across the chest.
Once Quinn got beyond her general description and focused on details, he was struck by the haunted quality of her dark eyes. The pale flesh of her face was taut over good bones. She was youthful yet haggard, as if she’d just gotten over a serious illness. Quinn could almost smell fear emanating from her.
“This is the investigative agency?” she said.
He smiled. “You’re in the right place.”
“Whew! Haven’t been there for a while.” She gave him a narrow look. “You should be Captain Frank Quinn.”
“I am. Not a captain any longer, though.”
“Wow. Right place, right person.” She advanced closer to his desk and he motioned toward a chair. Something told him he shouldn’t stand up and loom over her. She might take flight like an exotic bird.
She rolled the chair closer to the desk an
d sat down, assuming a prim posture. Nearer to him now, the fear in her was even more evident. As was a sadness.
“First of all,” she said, “let’s get it on the table that I’m crazy, but not all the time.”
“Noted,” Quinn said.
She waved her slender arms. “Schizophrenic is the diagnosis. Voices, hallucinations, the whole bag of agony.”
“We can work around that,” Quinn said.
She grinned. “You sound like my analyst.”
He was glad to hear she was in treatment.
“My name is Linda Brooks,” she said, “and I’m being followed.” She leaned slightly forward as if to give the words more impact. “Not just today, right now, but for about a week. It’s like I have a shadow, only it’s not a shadow. A shadow doesn’t keep its distance. Or disappear suddenly even though no light has been switched on. No shadow I’ve seen, anyway.”
“Okay, Linda. Have you gotten a good look at him?”
“How did you know it was a him?”
“I surmised. I do that a lot.”
“Yeah, you would. He’s about five ten or so, thin and fit looking. He wears a blue and gray sweat suit some of the time. Other times jeans and joggers. Some of the time a suit and tie. If I saw him in a photograph, I’d probably recognize him.”
Quinn raised a forefinger, motioning for her to wait a moment, then rummaged through one of his desk drawers. He drew out a copy of an old photo of Daniel Danielle from a Miami Herald news item and laid it on the desk.
Linda edged closer and peered at it. “That’s him.”
Quinn got another photo, this one a shot of Jerry Lido taken for Q amp;A files.
“I told you, that’s him,” Linda said, glancing at the photo.
“Okay,” Quinn said. The two men weren’t completely dissimilar. They were about the same size and each had dark hair. Daniel was wearing what looked like a prison shirt, the booze-emaciated Lido a blue shirt with a loosened tie.
“They’re not the same man,” Quinn pointed out.
“I know that. But they could be at different times.”
It took Quinn a few seconds to understand what she meant. “You mean following you at different times?”
“Of course. I’m not stupid. I don’t think they change identities, just that the same man can look different in different photographs. I mean, I’m not crazy all the time.”
“You said that.” He suspected it was her mantra.
“Now you sound like my analyst.”
Time to get off this track. “I won’t be analyzing you, just helping if I can. By the way, who is your analyst?”
Without hesitating, she gave him the name and address of a psychoanalyst he’d never heard of but who had a respectable address.
“I have good medical insurance,” she said, while Quinn was still jotting down the information. “My mother saw to that before she died. My father died the year before she did.”
“Natural deaths, I assume.”
“Sure. None of that forty-whacks stuff.”
“Other relatives?”
“None who’ll have anything to do with me. I stole from all of them.”
“How long have you been seeing Dr. Moore?” Quinn asked.
“Years and years. I’m not crazy twenty-four-seven. When I take my meds I’m perfectly normal for a while.”
“Is this the first time you’ve been followed?”
“By someone who wasn’t from the OSS, yes. You know who they are?”
“A long time ago, they became the CIA,” Quinn said.
“That’s if you accept the lie that they were ever completely disbanded.”
“I’ve often wondered,” Quinn said.
“I know you’re not the cops. You’ll want money. I can’t pay you.”
“We’ll do it pro bono.” Because the city is paying me, and because you resemble Pearl.
“It would be best if you could catch him in my bed.”
“He sleeps in your bed?”
“Naps, maybe. I can see that somebody’s been lying in it. When I’m not there, of course. He stays in my apartment sometimes when I’m not home.”
“How does he get in?”
“Windows sometimes, if they’re unlocked. And he probably has a key that opens all doors.”
“Have you and he ever been there at the same time?”
“Once, when I saw him leaving through a window. But time and place always intersect someplace, don’t they?”
“They do,” Quinn said.
“So here’s my place.” She dug in her purse for a paper and pencil and wrote down a West Side address a few blocks off Broadway, uptown from where they sat. Beneath the address was a phone number. “I know how you work,” she said, pushing the paper toward him over the desktop. “I’ve read the literature. I won’t know you’re around, but you’ll be there. If he comes around again, whoever’s watching over me will tackle him. Bend his arm behind his back and he’ll talk. You can make him tell you who he is. We both know who he is. The wind told me who he is.”
“Is that where you hear voices, in the wind?”
“Not always. But pretty often, actually. If the wind is blowing on stone.”
Quinn thought that would be almost all the time, in New York. “What have the voices been telling you?”
“To be careful. For God’s sake, be careful.” She stared at Quinn with those eyes that had seen way too much that wasn’t there, but in her view had to be somewhere. Whatever happened in her world became twisted and sharp before she could get a proper grasp of it. Her mortal enemy roamed the interior of her skull. Probably the pressure never ceased.
Quinn understood that he couldn’t imagine her pain.
58
T he killer watched Linda leave Q amp;A. Linda looked up and down the block but didn’t notice him. Perhaps she’d seen him but didn’t want to admit he was there, and so let her gaze slide past.
It was wonderful that she’d come here. She understood, and without knowing who or what was stalking her. And on some level Quinn would know what Linda knew, that he was meeting the woman whose violent death he’d soon be investigating. Of course, probably neither of them had talked about it. Not directly, anyway.
The elephant in the room was no less invisible and unmentioned because it was preparing to charge.
The Shadow Guardians meeting at the library had gone well. Penny felt better about it when she learned that Ms. Culver wasn’t going to attend. She had a seminar on e-books at another library that evening.
Penny had come away assured that the Shadow Guardians weren’t a group of far-right or far-left nutcases. They were wives and children of cops who wanted to make sure their loved ones had every advantage in a war against crime that was becoming more and more one-sided. The bad guys-the drug dealers, muggers, gang-bangers, and plain old thieves-were winning. And had the police outnumbered and outgunned. The Shadow Guardians were there to help and to prevent, that was all. But there was no doubt that even that could be dangerous.
The guest speaker at the meeting, a woman with sprayed, helmet-like hair, from California, talked about how this concept was working in some of her state’s large cities. The organization wasn’t an extension of the police force, but a simple aid in the critical time before confrontations and arrests. It helped to put time and numbers on the side of the law. It had saved some lives.
Though she’d been advised to sleep on her decision, Penny joined the Shadow Guardians that evening.
It was Penny’s day off at the library. She kept her destination a secret from Feds, and from everyone else. Feds didn’t really understand the pressure she was under because of his job. He certainly wouldn’t understand how what she was doing would relieve that pressure-at least for a while.
Penny had roamed the Internet until late last night, contacting several Shadow Guardians via their websites, searching for answers. She’d been referred to a woman named Noreen, an ex-cop’s wife who ran a blog about and for cops’ wives
. Sensing a kindred spirit, Penny had messaged Noreen.
She’d been surprised when she got a reply early the next morning. Surprised again by something Noreen recommended.
Penny took the subway to Grand Central, then a short train ride to a spot in New Jersey outside Newark. She was wearing jeans, a darker blue blouse, her worn jogging shoes, and dark sunglasses. All very unobtrusive. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if she was recognized, but she’d have a lot of explaining to do. Mostly to Feds.
It would be better all around if he never found out about this. And, she hoped, she wouldn’t always need it.
She hailed a taxi and gave the driver an address.
Half an hour later she was on the line at Shooter’s Alley, a public firing range. Penny used a house gun. She didn’t own or want a gun, and using a rental precluded Sullivan Act violations and crossing state lines and sundry other problems a gun could cause.
What surprised her about the firing range, and the nine-millimeter Walther semiautomatic that she used, was that she loved to shoot. The bullets went into a paper target on which was the outline of a man. Life-sized, from the waist up. He had broad shoulders and an oval face without features.
She could imagine the man to be whomever she chose. Usually it was the man who’d killed her sister. Sometimes it was the killer Feds sought. Sometimes it was simply a stranger.
Penny wore earplugs, but she liked the heavy bark of the gun, the feel of it kicking in her hand.
When the electric winch brought the target back to her on its track, she enjoyed seeing that most of her shots had gone where she’d aimed. Usually it was the target’s head. Sometimes the heart.
The experience was, as Noreen on the Internet had promised, stress relieving and liberating.
Not that she ever wanted to use the gun on someone, or even carry the bulky, oily thing in her purse.
But somehow it helped her to know that she could.
If she wanted to, she could.
59
J ody stood up so Sarah Benham would notice her on the other side of The Happy Noodle.
Sarah, smoothing back her hair and patting this and that into place after coming in out of the cooling summer breeze, saw her immediately and smiled and waved back. She began weaving among the tables of the crowded restaurant, holding a general direction toward Jody like a ship in a storm.