by John Lutz
“I was Dr. Moore’s part-time assistant and receptionist,” Cleo said.
“Did you ever meet Linda Brooks?”
“A few times. When she came in for appointments.”
“Do you know why she was being treated? Her… issue?”
“Not exactly. And like I said, I’m not sure I should be discussing-”
“You don’t doubt my identity, do you, dear?”
“Of course not. I’ve seen you in the papers, on TV news. But don’t you need a warrant or something?”
“I can get one, if you want to go on record as being uncooperative.”
“Oh, I don’t mean to be uncooperative. I just don’t know what the patient’s rights are, even though…”
“The patient is dead,” Quinn finished for her. “I suspect that if Linda Brooks could somehow communicate with us, she’d want you to let the people investigating her and Dr. Moore’s deaths examine her file.”
“Probably,” Cleo conceded.
“While you’re making up your mind,” Quinn said, “can you tell me why Linda Brooks was being treated?”
Cleo fought with her indecision for several seconds, then said, “I guess. She was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic.”
“Meaning?” He wanted to keep Cleo talking.
“She suspected people of being out to get her. And she had hallucinations. Heard voices.” Cleo looked around helplessly. “I don’t know the details. Dr. Moore didn’t talk much to me about her patients.”
“Still, you learned things.”
“I learned things,” Cleo agreed.
“Had Linda Brooks been getting better?”
“There was no getting better for her. She had to learn to adjust to being… disturbed.”
“Was she disturbed about anything in particular lately?”
Cleo held on to the back of the desk chair and looked away from Quinn. Then back at him. “She thought someone was following her. A man. She’d thought that before.”
“Was he someone she knew?”
“No, but he’d follow her, and sometimes when she’d get home, she’d know he’d been in her apartment.”
“How?”
“That I don’t know. You’d have to consult the file.”
Neither of them spoke for what seemed a long time. Quinn knew when to hold his silence. He made a bet with himself.
“The files are in those brown cabinets behind the doctor’s desk,” Cleo said.
Quinn smiled slightly but said nothing.
Cleo stood straighter. “I’m going down and around the block for a coffee. Do you mind keeping an eye on things while I’m gone?”
“You can trust me,” Quinn said.
Cleo had been clutching a key chain. She laid it on the desk. Without looking at Quinn, she hurried from the office and closed the door behind her, leaving him alone with the ghost of Dr. Moore.
It was easy enough to find the key that unlocked all the drawers of the file cabinet, and it was easy enough to find the file on Linda Brooks.
Quinn had been hoping for some DVDs or cassettes, recordings of the doctor’s sessions with Linda. Instead he found copious notes. Pages of them. Apparently Linda had talked, and Dr. Moore listened as a psychoanalyst should, and made notes.
The printer near the computer out in the anteroom was one of those multifunctional ones that also scanned, faxed, and copied. Quinn was glad to see it held plenty of paper.
It took him a few minutes to get onto it; then he got to work making copies of Dr. Moore’s notes.
He hoped Cleo would take her time over her coffee.
An hour later, at his desk at Q amp;A’s headquarters, Quinn began to read.
There wasn’t much more to learn about Linda Brooks. She did hallucinate. She did hear voices. As Quinn read, he could empathize with the agony the young woman had been enduring, the loneliness. And he got a sense of the courage she must have had in order to adjust as well as she had and build some kind of life despite her persistent illness. He found himself liking this woman he’d let be tortured and murdered.
Jesus! Don’t do that to yourself!
There wasn’t much in life Quinn hated more than self-pity and its destructiveness. It was an emotion Linda Brooks seemed to have for the most part avoided. She’d been a fighter.
And a fatalist.
That was what this killer knew about his victims-they were fatalists. At a certain point something would break in them and they would give themselves to him. That was the moment the monster in him lived for, the moment they were completely his.
Fedderman came into the office, swiping his forearm across his forehead. He was carrying his suit coat draped over his shoulder and he looked beat. In his right hand was a small brown paper sack.
He nodded a hello to Quinn as he crossed from the door to Quinn’s desk. Then he opened the bag and spilled out a dozen or so small plastic tubular objects on the desk top. They looked like cigarette lighters and for an instant Quinn’s hand moved toward his shirt pocket where he used to carry his cigars, when he’d smoked them more frequently.
“What are those?” he asked.
“Thumb drives. Or flash drives. I dunno; I can’t keep up with tech talk.”
Quinn stared up at him.
“You plug them into a USB port in your computer and they hold all kinds of information. Like a disk drive, only they’re not.”
“What the hell’s a USB port?”
“You gotta be kidding.” Fedderman pointed to a tiny port on the tower of Quinn’s computer.
“Oh, yeah,” Quinn said. “I use those all the time.” He pushed the plastic cylinders around with his finger. “So where’d you get them?”
“Dr. Grace Moore’s apartment. They’re videos of the doctor’s sessions with some of her patients.”
“Including Linda Brooks?”
“Yeah. I watched her latest session on the doctor’s computer before I came here. She said she was being followed by someone who looked like Frank Sinatra.”
“Ring-a-ding-ding,” Quinn said.
“The doctor was going with Linda to her apartment to prove to her nobody was following her or waiting for her there.”
“This was the day of the murder?”
“ ’Fraid so.”
Quinn bowed his head and let out a long breath.
“Things get on tracks,” Fedderman said, “and it’s like there’s no way to stop the train wreck.” He didn’t tell Quinn he was actually thinking about Penny and him, where they might be heading.
“Anybody else know you took these thumb drives?”
Fedderman shook his head. “Just the two of us. There are little squares of tape on the bottoms of them, listing the patient’s names. You’d be surprised by some of those names.”
“I’ll make a copy of Linda Brooks’s, and we won’t watch the others. Then you better wipe them and put them back where you found them.”
“You don’t think we should hand them over to Renz?”
“Are you kidding?” Quinn asked.
“Actually,” Fedderman said, “I am.”
That night at the Hamaker Hotel near Times Square, Harley Renz leaned over and kissed Olivia good-bye. She was sleeping deeply, snoring lightly, and didn’t notice.
Renz walked lightly even though he was sure he couldn’t wake Olivia with a gunshot. She’d taken something, and he hadn’t asked what. After dressing carefully, he used a washcloth from the bathroom to wipe the glass he’d used to drink Jack Daniel’s; then he slipped the bottle into his briefcase that was propped on a chair. He was sure he hadn’t touched anything in the bathroom or the rest of the hotel suite that would leave a legible print. He was always careful to touch almost nothing but Olivia, but especially so since his conversation with Jim Tennyson.
Nothing must go wrong. Women, one of Renz’s favorite perks of his office, had brought down more than one hardworking police commissioner. The trouble he went to when he saw Olivia was a precaution, Renz knew, but it allow
ed him to sleep better.
Or it had before his visit from Jim Tennyson. Weaver was a help in that regard, keeping tabs on Tennyson. But Tennyson was an undercover guy with street smarts. Renz knew he could slip Weaver when it suited him. He had to trust Tennyson, at least until he could get something on him. Mutual damaging information among thieves was almost as effective as honor.
The clock radio by the bed was set for six o’clock, and he knew that Olivia would get up and shower and be gone by seven. Renz stared at her in the dim light. It was hard to imagine something so beautiful being as deceitful as Tennyson had described.
But it wouldn’t be the first time Renz had seen it.
He slipped out of the hotel room and locked the door behind him, handling the knob with the dry washcloth, which he stuffed into his pocket as he strode toward the elevator.
No one had seen him exit, he was sure. He began to breathe easier.
Five minutes after Renz had left the room, someone else entered.
69
P enny wasn’t quite ready to tell Fedderman about the Shadow Guardians. She wondered if the time would ever be right.
“I saw yesterday how it is when your mind becomes your enemy,” Fedderman said.
He and Penny were in the apartment kitchen, drinking coffee and eating a Danish pastry they’d bought last night at the bakery down the street. Penny could do okay on this kind of breakfast. Sugar and caffeine. Fedderman figured he’d be jumpy as a cat until he got some lunch into him.
“Are we talking about insanity?” Penny asked.
“Yeah. Quinn and I listened to a recording of a young woman spilling her guts to her analyst. She was in so much pain I felt it along with her.”
“Feds the empathetic cop.”
“It made our problems seem small.”
Penny laid down her Danish and licked her fingers. “Are you trying to minimize my constant worry that you’re going to be seriously wounded or killed?”
“Are you trying to pick a fight?”
“You’re the one who implied I was some kind of candy ass because I worried about you.” You should see me at the pistol range.
“I didn’t say that. Or even imply it.”
“Then why bring up this poor woman’s misery if not to dwarf mine?”
Fedderman didn’t have an answer. He hated arguing with someone smarter than he was.
He stood up and finished his coffee in two long swallows, then went over and put the cup in the sink. He returned to the table not to sit down, but to bend over and kiss Penny’s cheek. “I’ve gotta get to work.”
“To practice your religion.”
“My job,” Fedderman said, still trying to stifle his anger.
“Your obsession.”
“Okay, I’ll buy that-my obsession.”
“It’s Quinn. His obsessive behavior rubs off on you and the rest of the people at Q and A.”
“Maybe,” Fedderman said. “Obsession, persistence, dedication… whatever you want to call it, we get results.”
“And then?”
“People’s lives are saved.”
Penny attacked her Danish again. Chewed and swallowed. “So you have the high moral ground again, when both of us know it’s nothing more than a dangerous, sick game for all of you.”
“It’s a game we’re trying to end.”
“Isn’t that true of all games?”
Damn her! Being the intelligent one again.
“Most games,” he said.
He picked up his suit coat from where it was draped over the back of a kitchen chair and headed for the door.
“You’ve got icing all over your fingers,” Penny said behind him.
“I don’t care.”
“Typical.”
Chancellor Linden Schueller closed the lid of his laptop computer, then zipped the machine into its soft leather case. He’d been working on a program he’d developed that used GPS, distance, speed, and altitude to calculate metal fatigue on aircraft. The program would soon be working, but he’d probably keep it to himself. Use it to maintain his own private plane.
He sipped his iced tea and settled back in his leather recliner. He appreciated these brief stretches of ennui in his otherwise busy schedule. Where he sat, if he turned his head slightly, he had a wonderful view out the open French doors of Waycliffe’s green, manicured grounds.
The preteen lacrosse teams, both male and female, were out on the wide lawn, practicing their moves. They were from the Woodrow Wilson School and the Pierre Laclede Academy, both in towns a few hours’ bus ride away. The two schools used Waycliffe College’s facilities for practice and to play their games in what was known as the G3 division. The players weren’t as developed or skilled as the older Waycliffe athletes, but the chancellor enjoyed watching them. Some of them were future Waycliffe students.
“I see some real possibilities out there,” said Professor Wayne Tangler, who taught comparative literature. He was the one who looked like a western gunslinger, with his leanness, bushy mustache, lean build, and gray-eyed stare. He had never sat on a horse or fired a gun.
“Always,” Chancellor Schueller said, picking up a pair of binoculars and watching a tall boy in blue shorts run and weave through the field. “But you never know how much they’re going to grow in the next few years.”
“Yes, they need size and strength,” Tangler said. “Sometimes you can tell their eventual size by looking at their parents.”
“If the parents ever bother visiting the campus.”
“They’d come more often if they realized it was such a beautiful setting.”
Since it was the weekend they weren’t in Schueller’s office, but in his house on the edge of the campus. It was a large brick two-story with a portico in front. There was a walled-in brick patio in back that turned a corner and ran halfway down the house’s west side. The wall was only twenty-four inches high and its purpose was decorative. Ivy grew over some of it, and twined halfway up the side of the house. Two sets of French doors gave access to the patio from the house. There was lawn furniture out there, cushioned chairs, and a round table with an umbrella tilted for shade.
The inside of the house was spacious and eclectically furnished. On display were items acquired by Schueller during his annual journeys overseas. Statuary he’d had shipped from Greece and Italy, a table from Germany. There were circular and square soft leather pads beneath everything that might scratch the expensive wood and its antique patina. The tall mahogany bookcases in the den where they sat sipping iced tea were from France. They were lined up along one wall and half of another. Almost enough books to qualify for a library, arranged every which way in the shelves. The atmosphere was pleasant in here. Overstuffed and scholarly. No doubt exactly what Schueller and his decorator had envisioned. Mounted on one wall was a Manet preliminary sketch of a nude woman reclining on a sofa. Tangler knew the sketch was genuine. On an open French provincial antique secretary with its mottled original finish sat a modern desk computer, a contrast of ages. He knew that Schueller was skillful on the computer, and that he was on Facebook. It was amazing, what you could find on Facebook. Whom you could find. Old friends. New friends. Any kind of woman.
Tangler stood up and walked to the open French doors. He went halfway outside and stared away from the lacrosse players and wide lawn, at the woods behind the house. The stretch of woods, mostly oaks and hard maples, ensured privacy from the direction of the campus. Crickets were chirping back there, making quite a racket. He mused that it wasn’t such a good idea to have woods so near a house. For security reasons.
“The cops have come and gone here,” he said, “and might come back.”
“True,” Schueller said. Letting the binoculars dangle on their leather strap around his neck, he produced the briar pipe he usually carried but never smoked. After filling its bowl with aromatic tobacco from a soft leather pouch, he tamped it down with a forefinger. He didn’t light the pipe.
“That lie we all told, about me
eting in your office the evening of the Macy Collins murder-we still don’t know whom we were protecting.”
“Better if we don’t,” Schueller said. “It’s fortunate that it worked out that way.”
“But there have been more and similar murders. If we were asked questions again by the police, we’d have to lie again. We’re accomplices now.”
“Only if we’re found out. And we can’t be, if we simply stick to our guns. And don’t forget what else we don’t want the police investigating.”
“But Jesus, Linden, it looks as if we’re protecting a serial killer. We probably are protecting a serial killer.”
“I seriously doubt that. I do know we’re protecting ourselves. Besides, we have no choice. We’re in it too deep now, even if we wanted to tell the truth.”
“Getting rich through crime is one thing. Murder is something else.”
“True,” the chancellor said. “Murder doesn’t necessarily make you rich.”
Tangler stared at Schueller with those cold gray eyes, but Schueller didn’t wilt. A tougher guy than he appeared, Tangler thought. There were other, obvious questions he wanted to ask Schueller, but he knew he wouldn’t. Was it planned so we’d have no choice? Does someone control Schueller the way Schueller controls his wayward faculty members?
Questions left unasked.
We’ve waited too long and we’re stuck. No choice now, other than a conspiracy of silence.
Circumstances had turned a questionable business arrangement into something that had trapped them all.
“That kid in the blue shorts can really run,” Schueller said, looking again out the French windows but not in the same direction as Tangler.
“Needs coaching,” Tangler said.
“Don’t they all?”
“Did you ever consider more sports? Different ones?”
“Yes. But at this level, they cost more than they earn.”
“Hm,” Tangler said, coming back all the way into the study. “We can only hope Blue Shorts doesn’t get hurt and has to study during his college years.”
“If he enrolls here,” Schueller said, “studying is precisely what he’ll have to do.”
Through the French doors the chancellor could see one squirrel chasing another up a large tree, round and round. Neither squirrel was ever in a position to see the other, yet each knew the other was there.