Pulse fq-7

by John Lutz

  “We know about it,” Pearl said. “She was due to go home, but she’s staying in the hospital. Which puts Meeding Properties in something of a public relations quandary.”

  “So I was searching the files for something to use against Enders and Coil.”

  “Use against them?”

  “Against their client, actually.”

  “It amounts to the same thing,” Quinn pointed out.

  “You were searching for something your own firm did that could be construed as criminal?” Pearl asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Isn’t that criminal?”

  “I could make a case for it being legal. I’m an employee. Why shouldn’t I have access to the files? I might have broken some obscure company regulation-though I’ve never seen anything specific-but that doesn’t mean a statute has been violated.”

  Pearl chewed her lower lip. Quinn tried not to smile,

  “I’m not going to argue law with you,” Pearl said. “What did you find?”

  “Exchanges of encrypted e-mails with somebody at Waycliffe.”

  “My, my,” Quinn said.

  “Did you break the encryption?” Pearl asked.

  “Enough to see the word cabal used more than once. And my business psychology professor at Waycliffe, Elaine Pratt, was the recipient and sender of some of the e-mails. That’s why I rented a car and drove up to Waycliffe.”

  “To do some breaking and entering,” Pearl said.

  “I’m a student there,” Jody reminded her.

  “So did you learn something more about Meeding Properties and Mildred Dash?” Quinn asked. “And a cable?”

  “Cabal,” Jody said. “A secret group that has some kind of agenda.”

  “Did you learn the secret agenda?”

  “No. But Meeding is in trouble. Time’s running out on the date they have to finish demolition. If they don’t make the deadline, they’ll lose a humongous amount of money. I could tell even though they were encrypted that the issue with Mildred Dash was what a lot of the e-mails were about.”

  “So maybe the college is invested in Meeding Properties,” Quinn said.

  “So why would that be such a big secret?”

  “I dunno. PR?”

  “Ha! The college portfolio contains cigarette companies, so I don’t think they’d be ashamed of Meeding. Unless murder was involved.”

  “Murder?”

  “Maybe. Hard to say for sure, with the encryption. Or Professor Pratt might have been talking about a teaching project. She had a file stuffed with newspaper items about some old murders. We discuss that kind of thing in her class all the time.”

  “So who was the killer?” Quinn asked.

  “Daniel something.”

  “Daniel Danielle? Last name a female version of the first?”

  Jody slapped her forehead so hard her springy red hair jiggled. “Of course! It should have registered. Only this guy died like over a decade ago.”

  Quinn looked at Pearl. Pearl looked at Quinn and Jody. All of them thinking this could be a coincidence, Professor Pratt researching for her class presentation the same killer who appeared to have returned and taken up where he’d left off when he’d supposedly died ten years ago. After all, Daniel Danielle was a topical subject again. Fair game for a psych teacher.

  “Coincidences do happen,” Jody said, “or there wouldn’t be such a word.”

  “What are you going to do with your information?” Quinn asked.

  “Try to stop demolition somehow on Mildred Dash’s apartment.”

  “You mean calling the shots because you might have something on Enders and Coil?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Leverage?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Extortion?”

  “I’m not gaining anything.”

  “Blackmail?”

  “I wouldn’t call it that.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “Preventing something criminal. Do either of you know anything about it?”

  “I don’t,” Pearl said.

  “We don’t,” Quinn added.

  “Okay.”

  Quinn and Pearl sat staring at each other. They both felt as if they’d just been spewed from a conversational whirlpool.

  Jody smiled and stood up from her chair. “Is it my turn to help with the dishes?”

  “It’s your turn to do the dishes,” Pearl said.

  “That’s right.” Jody began collecting the paper plates and plastic utensils supplied by the restaurant and delis.

  Off she went into the kitchen, almost tripping over the cat still intent on its ice cream.

  Pearl hadn’t moved. She was gazing toward the kitchen, looking solemn and concerned.

  “Your kid,” Quinn said.

  73

  P earl shouldn’t have followed Jody the next morning, but she did.

  Things were accumulating in a way that made her uneasy. Who was this Sarah Benham woman, and what was the basis of her friendship with Jody? What might Jody do to get herself into the kind of trouble that would follow her all her life? Pearl suspected her daughter wasn’t far from going to the demolition site of Mildred Dash’s apartment and causing a problem. Youth often thought that if enough hell was raised, a solution would be forthcoming.

  Why was Jody so discontented? Such a pea under the mattress? Pearl thought about Jody’s father. He’d been, if anything, too mellow. It had been as if his music sweetened his life. Even more than Pearl had sweetened it. He had always been too preoccupied to get into the various kinds of trouble that seemed to attract Jody. Where the hell did Jody get-?

  Pearl put the question out of her mind so she could concentrate on what she was doing. Following her daughter, as any good mother would.

  Ahead of her, Jody paused to look at some junk in a street vendor’s cart. Tshirts, caps, belts, paste jewelry, silver and gold chains, sunglasses, and visors-the gaudy display seemed to sway in the morning breeze. Or maybe that was an illusion.

  Pearl moved over to a florist shop doorway, out of the stream of pedestrian traffic. While she watched her daughter absently pick through the street vendor’s merchandise, she was thinking Okay, or No, no, don’t buy that.

  Mom interfering by telepathy.

  Jody did buy something. Apparently some small piece of jewelry. Then she walked on.

  As Pearl followed, Jody broke into a jog in order to join a knot of people hurrying across an intersection with the traffic signal.

  Uh-oh.

  Pearl knew she’d have to jog to keep up, maybe cross over the other way and keep pace on the opposite side of the street. If traffic would cooperate.

  All she could see of Jody now was her head of springy red hair. She decided her best bet would be to reach the intersection where Jody had crossed and see if she could catch a break in the traffic.

  Pearl thought she might make it and was approaching the curb when a large shadow engulfed her. She slowed, glanced back, and saw that one of those red double-decker sightseeing buses was about to make a right turn in front of her.

  She slowed to a walk, giving ground to the behemoth.

  When she was almost at a stop, something rammed into the small of her back and shoved her from behind.

  She was in front of the turning bus.

  Pearl instinctively brought up her hands and slapped at the front of the bus with both palms. She pushed away from the warm wall of metal as the bus came at her. It wasn’t moving fast, but fast enough that she couldn’t get out of its path. She was in so close she wasn’t sure if the driver was even aware of her.

  Her palms were stinging, her locked elbows straining, as she backpedaled and tried to hold the bus at bay.

  Don’t fall, don’t fall, don’t fall…!

  Her maneuver worked, but not for long. She found herself falling. There were shouts, the hissing of air brakes.

  Someone or something had her left upper arm in a strong grip and yanked her sideways and away, as the bus his
sed and squealed to a stop.

  Pearl lay limp on the pavement, breathing in the smells of oil and heat and exhaust fumes. She saw that one of the bus’s tires was only inches from her twisted right leg. People were gathered around her, trying to help, touching her almost everywhere in order to reassure themselves, and her, that she was alive and not dead or seriously injured.

  Pearl brushed them away and managed to get to her feet, leaning against the stopped bus for support.

  Standing, squinting, she looked around her. Somebody had given her the extra few inches of pavement she needed in order to survive. Whoever had grabbed her arm and pulled her to the side had saved her life.

  She looked at the stunned, silent faces, and knew no one.

  Then a hand touched her shoulder and she heard a familiar voice.

  “You okay?”

  Pearl’s savior, Nancy Weaver.

  The killer had a way of moving at a near run on a crowded sidewalk without attracting attention. He’d pushed Pearl slightly harder than he’d intended, and she’d almost been killed. He hadn’t wanted her dead; he needed her alive-at least for a while longer.

  Fortunately some other woman, very much alert, had kept Pearl from perishing beneath the wheels of the bus. The killer smiled. That wasn’t Pearl’s fate at all. He would decide that.

  This was a message to Quinn as well as to Pearl: Anything could happen any time, anywhere, to anyone. But they already knew that. Brakes could hiss, tires screech on concrete, and then Wham! And it’s a different world.

  The message, a simple reminder: My choice.

  “I had my choice,” Weaver said, later at Q amp;A. “I could save Pearl and make sure she was all right, or I could go after whoever pushed her.”

  Pearl was sitting in her desk chair, bent forward and holding a damp washcloth on her knee where she’d skinned it. The knee had tiny bits of asphalt in it and stung like hell. Pearl was getting sore all over, the way it was sometimes after an auto accident. She was grateful for what Weaver had done, but anger and humiliation were also in her jumble of emotions.

  Weaver must have been tailing her.

  Then she thought about what almost happened and her anger paled.

  Someone tried to kill me.

  The others, Quinn, Fedderman, Sal, and Harold, were listening and watching the two women.

  “Didn’t you even get a glimpse of whoever shoved you?” Sal asked in his gravelly rasp. It almost hurt Pearl’s throat to listen to that voice.

  “All too fast,” Pearl said, “and from behind.”

  “It could have been one of two people,” Weaver said. “Keep in mind that I was concentrating on Pearl, on what was happening, so the rest was just an impression. Both possibilities were average height and build. They sort of crisscrossed behind Pearl just before she was shoved, so there was no way to know who did what.”

  “You think they were working together?”

  “Naw. Nothing like that.”

  “How were they dressed?” Quinn asked.

  “One guy in a brown suit. The other had on jeans, maybe, and a light blue short-sleeved shirt. Hair color on both of them was brown. Dark, anyway. Neither had a shaved head or a full beard, nothing like that. Average size, maybe on the slender side.”

  “Not much of a description.”

  “I was busy saving Pearl’s life.”

  “Tailing her so you could report to Renz.”

  “Doing my job.”

  “Question is,” Fedderman said, “why did the killer take a run at Pearl?”

  “If it was Daniel,” Quinn said.

  “Be too coincidental if it wasn’t.”

  “To Feds’s question,” Harold Mishkin said, “I think the answer is Quinn. This is a game to Daniel, and Quinn’s the dragon he has to slay. He’d see it as a triumph over Quinn if he could get Pearl. Even if he didn’t actually kill her. It’d raise the stakes of the game even higher.”

  “And he’s a high-stakes player,” Pearl said.

  Sal was staring at Mishkin. “Sometimes you surprise me, Harold.”

  “We’ll see what Helen has to say about it when she comes in,” Harold said. But they all knew that Helen had more or less weighed in on this one already.

  Weaver went over and got a cup of coffee. She sipped it while she walked back to the group. Her hand holding the cup began to shake, and she held the cup with both hands to steady it.

  “This was close,” she said. “It wasn’t for show.” Some of the coffee sloshed onto her hand. “Damn it!” She glared at all of them. “I thought you people were protecting Pearl with your own tail.”

  “I took it off,” Quinn said, “once it became known you were keeping a loose tail on her for Renz.”

  Weaver smiled miserably. “You weren’t supposed to know that.”

  “Everybody knows everything eventually,” Quinn said.

  Nobody spoke for a while, everyone thinking it was the who, what, when, and how much that made a difference.

  Everyone but Quinn. He was thinking about what happened to Pearl. So close. But was it meant to be that close? This wasn’t a knife in the dark, slow strangulation in a hog-tie, or artfully applied pain that eventually became shock and death. This wasn’t the way the killer took his prey.

  This was a message.

  “There’s nothing more to say on this for now,” Quinn said. “Meeting’s over.”

  “One thing,” the now perfectly calm Pearl said, looking at Weaver. “Thank you, Nancy.”

  Rare for Pearl.

  The text message Pearl received on her phone fifteen minutes later was succinct and untraceable:

  Whew!

  74

  T he next morning, Quinn sat at his desk and called Jerry Lido’s cell phone number.

  Lido answered on the second ring. Said, “Quinn.”

  “I know who I am, Jerry. You sober?”

  “It’s morning, Quinn.”

  “You sound astonished.”

  “You woke me up, is why I might sound sort of disoriented. I’m totally unmedicated. I heard about Pearl. How is she?”

  “Pearl is… Pearl.” Quinn knew enough not to ask how Lido had heard about Pearl’s close call.

  “That’s what I wanted to hear.”

  “I’ve got a job for you,” Quinn said. He told Lido about his and Pearl’s conversation with Jody, about Meeding Properties and Mildred Dash and something secretive at Waycliffe College, the professor who had a file on old Daniel Danielle murders, and the mysterious and over-friendly Sarah Benham. And Macy Collins.

  “Not to mention Daniel’s other, more recent victims,” Lido said.

  “Not to mention. Daniel is topical again, studied along with Dahmer and Bundy in college courses.”

  “And you want me to find out everything I can about all of this?”

  “That’s it,” Quinn said. “It’s all connected in some way. Or can be connected. Like puzzle pieces that don’t quite fit to create a picture.”

  “Because maybe one is missing.”

  “Or more than one.”

  “Waycliffe College,” Lido mused. “Don’t they have a lacrosse team?”

  “One of the best in the country.”

  “Is that a lie?”

  “Might be. Ask Helen the profiler. She’s a sports babe and would be happy to talk lacrosse.”

  Lido emitted a sound like an animal might make while struggling out of deep hibernation. Quinn thought he recognized it as a laugh but couldn’t be sure. Why did so many people with genius ability have so many quirks? Pearl was staring at him across the office as if she was wondering the same thing. She could only have picked up a word or two here and there in the conversation, so how could she know what he was thinking? She couldn’t know what they were talking about.

  He’d tell her after talking with Lido, of course. And tell the others. He was beginning to get the feeling he sometimes experienced when a part of his mind knew an investigation was tracking toward a conclusion. Like radar locking
on.

  That feeling was seldom wrong.

  “Gather round,” he told everyone, after breaking off his phone conversation with Lido.

  They did, looking curious, oddly eager, with slight forward leans and direct eye contact. Senses were at their peak. These were hunters, picking up vibes from the lead predator.

  “This have something to do with lacrosse?” Pearl asked.

  75

  W hile she was doing drone work at Enders and Coil, Jody’s cell phone played its “I Fought the Law” tune. She flipped it open to see Sarah Benham’s number.

  That was fine with Jody. Maybe she’d probe and find out what Sarah was doing at Waycliffe while Jody was there.

  But Sarah didn’t have time to talk now. She’d called to suggest she and Jody have lunch in an hour at their favorite restaurant-Sarah’s favorite, anyway-The Happy Noodle.

  “We haven’t gotten together for a while,” Sarah said, “so I thought, why not this afternoon?”

  “Why not?” Jody said. “We can catch up with each other.”

  They agreed on a time, and Sarah called and made a reservation.

  It was Sarah who arrived at the restaurant first. Jody saw her standing up and waving among the crowded tables.

  Sarah had somehow wrangled a booth, where they could talk with at least some privacy. Jody exchanged air kisses with her and they both sat down.

  “I’ve got two apple martinis coming,” Sarah said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “No one could mind an apple martini,” Jody said. “You’ve made me a convert.”

  A waiter arrived with their drinks, and they told him they’d study the menu a while before ordering.

  Sarah sipped her drink. She was wearing makeup, but she seemed slightly older today. Thin lines showed when she tilted her head a certain way and changed the cast of the lighting. “So how are things going at Enders and Coil?”

  Jody smiled ruefully and sampled her martini.

  “Something wrong at the firm?” Sarah asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Jody said. “Mildred Dash is still hospitalized. She was supposed to come home a few days ago but had a setback, and the situation has become awkward. Her holdout is making bigger news.”