by John Lutz
Jesus! Teenage girls!
“Have you seen him since?”
Lauri didn’t answer right away.
“Lauri, I need the truth from you. It’s important.”
“I’ve seen him a few times. We even had lunch once.”
Surprised, Pearl actually said, “Huh?”
“Don’t get mad at me, Pearl. None of it means a thing. I only did it to make Wormy jealous.”
Sure. Why wouldn’t any woman prefer Wormy to Mr. Hot?
“How did you happen to get together the first time?” Pearl asked.
“We just happened to bump into each other.”
“How? Where?”
Lauri gave a long sigh.
“Lauri, damn it!”
“Okay, I saw Jeb again when I was following you. He was sorta hanging around outside the Pepper Tree when you were inside having lunch with some woman. We talked and agreed us being there would be our secret. Then I saw him again, a few days later, and we talked again and went for lunch. He was sorta in disguise, in jeans and wearing a Red Sox cap. It was almost like he was following you like I was and didn’t want to be spotted.”
Almost?
Pearl didn’t say anything for a while. Quinn might be right. She might be a prospective victim.
“Pearl, you okay?”
“Yeah, Lauri.”
“I really gotta get to work.”
“Go, and thank you.”
Pearl hung up the phone and sat stunned and wondering, trying to come up with some plausible reason other than her impending murder why Jeb might have been secretly watching her.
If he was the Butcher, why hadn’t he already killed her?
The answer was obvious—she was useful. He was using her to keep tabs on the investigation.
“Something here,” Quinn said, excitement in his voice, but also puzzlement.
He was leaning almost close enough to his computer to take a bite out of it.
“I’ve got a match on the print.”
47
Pearl was up out of her chair and leaning over Quinn, balancing with her hand on his shoulder so she could see his computer monitor.
“It’s not a criminal, military, or federal employee site,” he said. “It’s the Florida Department of Children and Families archives.”
Pearl read the information on the screen. The print was a ninety percent match with the right middle finger of the 1980 print of a lost child in Florida identified as Sherman Kraft.
Pearl ran the name through her memory and came up with nothing.
She continued to watch as Quinn played the computer keys and mouse. They followed the thread and the story unfolded:
In Harrison County, Florida, in August of 1980, a boy about ten was found dazed and wandering along a swamp road. His clothes were bloody and ragged. He had an injured leg, was malnourished, and appeared to have been living for some time in the swamp. He also remained in a state of shock and refused to utter a sound.
Local news referred to him simply as “the Swamp Boy” until four days after he was found, when his newspaper photo was recognized as that of Sherman Kraft. He was the son of a woman who lived in a remote house on the edge of the swamp, more than ten miles from where he was found. When authorities went to the house they learned little more. It was deserted, and Sherman’s mother, Myrna Kraft, was missing.
Apparently she was never found. There was speculation of foul play, and of her simply running away after losing, or deserting, her son. The archival accounts were concentrated on Sherman, so there was nothing more of substance about Myrna.
Quinn and Pearl kept following the thread, and later, infrequent news accounts told of how Sherman finally began to speak, but never of his experiences in the swamp, or what had led to them. Memory block. Nature’s protective device. He was like someone who’d survived a terrible car crash and could remember nothing of it. The rest of his mind was apparently unaffected. Tests on the boy revealed an amazingly high IQ.
Mesmerized, Quinn and Pearl read on about how he’d lived in a series of institutions and foster homes, all the time receiving special treatment and education because of his remarkable intelligence. High academic achievement and scholarship opportunities led him to graduate magna cum laude from Princeton in 1989 at the age of nineteen. He was thought to be brilliant but antisocial and arrogant. After a series of jobs ranging from restaurant manager to bond salesman, he disappeared.
There were photographs of Sherman at Princeton. Quinn placed the cursor on them and clicked them into enlargement.
Pearl gripped his shoulder and leaned in for a closer look.
She was reasonably sure she was looking at the young Jeb Jones.
Suddenly out of breath, she felt her knees gave out. She caught herself and sat down cross-legged on the floor beside Quinn’s desk chair.
“Goddamnit, Quinn!”
He looked down at her and ran the backs of his knuckles gently over her cheek. “It’s all right, Pearl.”
“I really screwed up.”
“When you left me, you mean?”
She snorted. He’s making a joke, surely. Just like him. She began to cry. “That’s not what I meant and you know it.”
“Yeah,” he said softly.
“Such a damned foul-up…”
“Not actually, Pearl. And the hell with it, you’re human.”
“Sometimes I wonder,” she said, and bit her lip.
“Pearl…”
She sniffled, wiped her nose with the back of her hand, and stood up. Quinn said nothing as she trudged to the half-bath, blew her nose, and splashed cold water on her face.
For a long time she stood leaning with both hands on the washbasin and watching the water swirl down the drain.
Feeling only slightly better, she returned to the office.
Quinn was still at his desk. The printer was whirring and clucking, doling out in glides and jerks the information on Sherman Kraft/Jeb Jones. Quinn was sitting back in his swivel chair, rotating slightly back and forth and watching the printer. When Pearl was near his desk, he looked up at her.
Con Ed was back from lunch or break or wherever they’d gone, and the jackhammer outside suddenly resumed its chattering, only louder. It sounded as if there might be two of them. Reinforcements had been called in to make Pearl feel even more miserable.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
“We call Renz for a warrant and some backup, then we go pick up Sherman Kraft.”
Pearl nodded. Sherman Kraft. Jeb Jones. This called for a hell of an adjustment in her thinking. In her feelings. She felt like lying back down on the floor, curling into a ball, and trying to process the entire ugly mess.
“You want to be there when we take him?” Quinn asked.
“I wouldn’t miss it.”
The jackhammers went at it full blast.
Pearl went to her desk and got her gun.
48
They were on their way to kill or capture Pearl’s Jeb Jones. Fedderman had the unmarked so they took Quinn’s Lincoln behemoth.
Driving fast and skillfully through midtown traffic, Quinn talked with Renz on his cell phone, setting up a rendezvous point near the Waverly Hotel. It had already been determined that Jeb was in his room, and most of that floor was quietly being evacuated. When the time came, SWAT team members would take the elevator to the floor above Jeb and station themselves in the stairwell. Then power to the elevators would be stopped, the stairwell below and fire escape would be blocked by uniformed cops and SWAT members, and Jeb Jones would be trapped.
When Quinn got off the phone and concentrated on weaving his way through stalled traffic, Pearl used her own phone to call her apartment and check for messages. Maybe there was one from Jeb.
My God, Jeb…
As she listened to her phone ring on the other end of the connection, Pearl wondered if she’d be able to stop Jeb if he bolted. If he decided to make a fight of it, or commit suicide by cop, would she be able to shoo
t him? The prospect made her intestines tie themselves in knots. The pain made her actually bend forward in her seat.
Pressing the cell phone to her ear, she listened to her message machine in her apartment click on. One message:
“Pearl?”
Her mother.
“Pearl, are you there? I’ve had a conversation with Mrs. Kahn, a nice lady, about her equally nice, not to mention handsome, nephew Milton, who comes here and visits with her often. At my suggestion Mrs. Kahn phoned him and he’s extremely interested in meeting you, dear, so since tomorrow was his regular visiting day anyway, I got together with Mrs. Kahn and set up a lunch in the nursing home cafeteria for the four of us, so the two of you can get to know one another without any pressure. At what would be the proper time, Mrs. Kahn and I would agree that we had to go for mahjongg and you two would be alone so nature could do what nature’s been doing best for thousands if not millions of years. That’s tomorrow at noon, Pearl. It’s pot roast day. Pot roast is the only dish they do well here, but they do it very well and with mushrooms, which are said by some to be an aphrodisiac. If you can’t make it, be sure to call me. If I were you, dear, I would wear that navy dress of yours with the matching shoes. Definitely not the red, Pearl. As for accessories—”
Pearl’s clamshell phone snapped closed with the force of powerful jaws.
Quinn didn’t slow down, but he took his eyes off traffic for a second to glance over at her. “Trouble?”
“Not unless I let it become trouble.”
Another curious glance. “Jones?”
“My mother.”
Quinn nodded grimly and drove on.
Quinn flashed his shield for the uniform standing next to a radio car that was skewed sideways in the street and blocking traffic. The cop stepped back and waved for Quinn to drive around the car. This required putting a front wheel up on the curb, but Quinn didn’t seem to mind. Pearl placed both hands on the dashboard to keep from getting bounced around.
He pulled the Lincoln in at the curb half a block up and just around the corner from the Waverton Hotel. The cross street was blocked, too, by a black Traffic Enforcement car. More than a dozen radio cars and two unmarked vans were parked at haphazard angles. Half a dozen SWAT guys were standing in a knot. About a dozen uniformed cops in bulky flak jackets were grouped near them. The SWAT people had dark, stubby automatic rifles. Some of the uniforms had shotguns. Quinn recognized Officer Vern Shults and his female partner, Nancy Weaver. Shults was nearing retirement and shouldn’t have been there. He was armed only with his regulation nine. The intrepid and promiscuous Weaver was carrying a shotgun. She spotted Quinn and Pearl and waved to them. A small woman with a backpack was standing off to the side, talking into what looked like a recorder.
This was much more backup than Quinn had requested. They were here to arrest a killer, not start a war. What the hell was Renz—
There was Renz, standing near one of the vans alongside a tall, blonde woman Quinn recognized as a local cable TV news anchor. As he and Pearl walked toward them, a brightly lettered news van entered the blocked street and parked at the opposite curb.
“Good,” Renz said, as Quinn and Pearl approached. “Now we can get to this.”
“Because we’re here, or the press?” Quinn asked.
Renz ignored the question and said something into the two-way clipped to his lapel. The anchorwoman, a blonde whose name Quinn remembered now was Mary Mulanphy, smiled faintly but knowingly.
“Who’s the woman with the SWAT guys?” Quinn asked.
“Cindy Sellers of City Beat,” Renz said. “We owe her. She gets the print scoop.”
Quinn wondered if newspaper people themselves still used the word scoop.
There was activity among the backup cops. A couple of car engines started, and a radio car backed swiftly toward where the one-way street was blocked.
Fedderman appeared out of nowhere and said, “He’s still in his room.”
Renz tucked in his chin and spoke into his lapel again to relay that information on his two-way. A two-man crew with a shoulder-mounted camera emerged from the TV news van, moving slowly and gingerly under the burden of technology, like a team of almost-drunks walking with exaggerated precision. Staying more or less on course, they crossed the street to get closer. They stopped about twenty feet away, and Mary Mulanphy stood out in the middle of the street and began speaking into a cordless microphone, facing the camera. Quinn knew he and the cops around him were part of the shot’s background.
Renz spoke into his lapel yet again, saying exactly what he’d said the last time and apparently getting an identical answer. Was this one for real, or was it for the media?
Quinn looked across the street and saw that the SWAT team and most of the uniformed cops had disappeared, and one of the unmarked vans was gone. Cindy Sellers had disappeared, too.
After a few minutes, Mulanphy backpedaled smoothly in her high heels to where she’d started from, stepped deftly aside, and nodded to Renz. “We’re still taping.” Quinn noticed she was the only one who didn’t have perspiration stains on her clothes. She in no way seemed bothered by the sun’s glare or the heat radiating from the summer-baked concrete.
“Traffic has just been interdicted up the block from the hotel,” Renz said loudly and with crisp enunciation, looking directly at a somewhat surprised Quinn. “We have all possible escape routes blocked. It’s time to start the operation. Main investigators will be accompanied by uniformed officers Shults and Weaver.” Quinn, Pearl, and Fedderman glanced at one another. Renz said, “I want everyone to please be careful. I don’t want anyone hurt.” He looked toward the camera, pretending to notice it for the first time, and raised a palm toward it, shaking his head. “We don’t have time for that now.” Loudly, back to Quinn: “This is a go.”
Quinn motioned for his team to follow, then walked toward the corner. By the time he’d turned it, Pearl and Fedderman were on either side of him. Shults and Weaver, in their bulky flak jackets, Weaver with her shotgun, brought up the rear.
Almost the rear. Actually, Mary Mulanphy and her camera crew brought up the rear, about fifty feet behind the others. Renz had stayed back at the rendezvous point to issue executive orders.
Pearl’s throat was dry. She felt like an actor in some kind of eerie movie as they approached the hotel’s marquee. The uniformed doorman who sometimes stood outside was nowhere in sight. All traffic, vehicular and pedestrian, had disappeared from the block. She hoped Jeb, up in his room, wouldn’t notice the sudden absence of traffic noise from directly below. Then she remembered his room didn’t face the street. They could catch him unawares.
They had to.
Without hesitating, they turned and entered the hotel lobby.
It wasn’t much cooler inside.
“You okay, Pearl?”
Quinn’s voice. He sounded farther away from her than just a few feet.
She nodded.
The lobby was deserted except for a guy in a gray business suit who’d been undercover but now had his shield displayed dangling in its leather case from his breast pocket. He unbuttoned his suit coat, like an Old West gunfighter getting ready to quick draw. There was no one behind the desk. Another plainclothes cop stood stone-faced and unmoving in the archway to the coffee shop.
The elevators were dead so the assault force rapidly took the carpeted stairs to the fourth floor, where Jeb Jones was registered.
“Goddamnit!” Pearl heard the blonde anchorwoman whose name she couldn’t remember say behind them, and there was a muffled noise like somebody tripping up the steps. Pearl figured that would be cut out of the tape. Maybe the poor guy who had to lug the camera up the stairs and keep it aimed and focused had tripped. She didn’t look back to see what had happened. At the third-floor landing, where there were two SWAT guys with automatic rifles, Pearl drew her nine-millimeter Glock from its belt holster and started concentrating hard.
The fourth floor was unnaturally quiet except for their f
ootfalls on the soft carpet.
As they approached Jeb’s room, Pearl said, “I’ll knock. If he looks through the peephole and sees me, he’ll open the door.”
“Don’t be a fool, Pearl,” Quinn told her. “Let these guys earn their money.”
She glanced back where he was motioning and was surprised to see that the two SWAT team members from the third-floor landing had followed them up.
“This is a media show for Renz!” she whispered angrily to Quinn.
“Tell no one,” he said to her softly, maybe smiling.
“If they shoot Jeb—”
The two SWAT guys moved out ahead of her and she shut up. They looked back at Quinn, who nodded.
The SWAT guys went in hard. One of them had a weighted battering ram slung by straps over his shoulder and crashed the door open, and the other tossed in a flash-bang grenade. There was a deafening sharp explosion that Pearl knew would do no damage but was meant to temporarily freeze whoever was in the room. Using those precious first few seconds, the grenade tosser charged inside. The door rammer followed. They were shouting over and over that they were police, making all the noise they could to maximize the element of surprise, and because they were revved. Behind Pearl, the blond anchorwoman was speaking frantically. And beyond her, tiny Cindy Sellers had rematerialized and was yammering into her recorder.
Jesus! Pearl thought.
Gotta get in there!
Time was on fast-forward and might leave her behind.
Her heart hammering like a machine gun in her rib cage, she passed Quinn and Fedderman on their way into the hotel room. Weaver somehow squeezed ahead of her, flak jacket and all, smelling of stale sweat and cheap perfume, shotgun leveled.
Don’t you shoot him, bitch!
Pearl held her Glock pressed tight against her thigh as she entered and glanced around.
At first she thought the room had been unoccupied, and she felt a great surge of relief.
Then a hand appeared above the narrow space between the bed and the wall, fingers spread wide.
Another hand.