by John Lutz
The smoke-fogged room suddenly became silent.
Jeb stood up slowly, surprise and fear on his face, but not panic. When he saw Pearl, his lips parted as if he were about to say something, and his expression of surprise turned to one of disappointment. Pearl felt for a moment as if she might begin to sob.
Damn it, hold on to yourself!
She swallowed, not liking how loud a sound it made.
Pearl knew Quinn had decided to put on a show for Renz. It was, after all, part of the deal. He held his old .38 police special revolver in both hands, pointed in Jeb’s direction but low enough so that if he fired, a bullet would go into the bed.
“Sherman Kraft, we have a warrant for your arrest for the murder of Marilyn Nelson. You have the right…”
At the mention of the name Sherman Kraft, Jeb suddenly looked stunned, and Pearl knew in heart as well as mind that they had the right man. Her wrong man.
Again.
But they’d solved the case. They’d stopped the killing. And she’d been part of it.
She had her emotions tightly tied and knotted as she listened to Quinn finish reading Jeb—or Sherman—his rights.
Fedderman gripped one of Jeb’s raised arms and led him out from behind the bed, then turned him around and yanked both his arms down behind his back.
Pearl stepped forward and handcuffed him.
She had on her cop’s face when he was led away and they exchanged glances. She wasn’t sure if he knew she was the one who’d cuffed him.
“Have you anything to say?” the blond anchorwoman asked Jeb, dancing nimbly alongside and trying to keep up.
He stared straight ahead. “Only to my attorney.”
Pearl thought, Bastard!
49
Sherman Kraft sat at a small oak table bolted to the floor in a precinct interrogation room. Behind him stood a uniformed officer with his arms crossed in a way that displayed bulging biceps. Shavers was his name, Quinn remembered. He was a lean-waisted black man who’d won a weightlifting championship while in the academy. Quinn figured he had to be well into his fifties by now, but he didn’t look it.
Besides the two unmoving figures and the table in the room there were four hard wooden chairs. They looked and were uncomfortable. It was in one of them that Sherman Kraft sat—uncomfortably.
Quinn, Pearl, and Fedderman were standing outside the room with Renz, looking in through the observation window. Kraft couldn’t see out, but he knew they were there, of course, having watched plenty of TV cop shows. From time to time he glanced in their direction.
He’d stuck to his word about waiting for his attorney, but surprised them by asking for a public defender. A call had been made to the Legal Aid Society.
“He doesn’t look worried,” Fedderman said.
“Concerned, though,” Renz said.
Pearl found it difficult to connect this pleasant-featured, mild-looking man with the killer who’d dismembered his victims and stacked their body parts in ritual fashion in their bathtubs. More and more she saw the world as a series of facades, and it scared the hell out of her.
The attorney from Legal Aid turned out to be Lisa Pareta, a woman in her forties with square-cut gray bangs framing a square-featured, ruddy face. She had blue eyes that always seemed to be red-rimmed and swollen, as if they hurt. Quinn knew her to be smart and tough.
Renz glanced over at her approaching figure. She wore a gray pantsuit, sensible black shoes, and was carrying a worn black leather briefcase. She had a confident smile and was swinging the briefcase in her right arm with each stride as if she wouldn’t mind bonking someone with it.
“Ball breaker,” Renz said in a low voice.
Pearl thought he had a point, but what did he expect?
“Lisa!” Renz’s jowly face shaped itself into a smile as he stepped forward to meet her.
Looking serious, flushed, and slightly out of breath, Pareta pretty much ignored him and said, “That my client in there?”
“The one without the uniform,” Renz said. Before she could ask, he handed her the arrest warrant and she scanned it and gave it back.
She looked at all of them as if they were the suspects and said, “I’m assuming he’s been read his rights and hasn’t yet been interrogated.”
“We tried,” Renz said honestly. “He’s been silent as the furniture, waiting for his champion.”
Pareta moved closer to the observation window and seemed to study her new client for a moment. Pearl wondered what she was thinking.
“I want to talk with him alone, without the muscle,” she said.
“If you’re brave enough,” Renz said. He unlocked the door and held it open for her, kept it open after she went inside, and motioned for Shavers to come out.
They watched Pareta sit across from her client, and the two of them talked for a few minutes with their heads close together, as if worried that the bug in the room might be activated. They were right, of course, but as every criminal attorney knew, the system wasn’t sensitive enough to eavesdrop on attorney-client whispered conversation.
After about five minutes, Pareta sat back and motioned for her unseen audience to come into the room.
Quinn, Pearl, and Fedderman went in. Renz stayed outside and listened.
Fedderman remained standing and let Quinn and Pearl take the other two chairs. Pareta had moved around to sit alongside her client. Pearl was in the chair farthest away from him.
“My client says he has alibis for the times of some of the Butcher murders,” Pareta said.
“Some of them?” Quinn said. “It only takes one murder charge to convict.”
“If you’re not interested in convicting the right man.”
Quinn looked dead-eyed at Sherman Kraft as he spoke. “Your fingerprints are being matched with the killer’s right now. You left a bloody print in your victim’s apartment, which means we have your DNA. It will be matched with the DNA on the swab we took when you were brought in.”
That wasn’t exactly true, of course, as the blood might be the victim’s.
Kraft looked at Pearl as if in appeal. “I’ve killed no one.”
“And your name isn’t Sherman Kraft,” she said bitterly.
“It isn’t,” said the suspect.
“Then you’ve got no worries,” Fedderman said. He smiled. “My name isn’t Sherman Kraft and I got no worries. I’m not even lawyered up.”
“It’s a wonderful world,” Pareta said, “where no one is named Sherman Kraft or has worries. We should all go out for egg creams.”
“How about going for murder one instead?” Quinn said. He focused more intently on the suspect, who now didn’t seem able to look away from him.
Quinn explained how they’d learned his identity, from the time Sherman had been found wandering the swamp road in Florida to when he disappeared from his last job after leaving Princeton.
“Your client’s a smart one,” Fedderman said to Pareta. He’d noticed her perk up at the mention of Princeton.
“Not so smart we don’t have him cold,” Quinn said.
Pareta sneered. “Like you’d have a ham sandwich if you had some bread and mustard, if you had some ham.” She glanced at Pearl. “You don’t have much to say.”
“I’m a good listener,” Pearl said.
Pareta blatantly took her measure, smiled faintly, and turned her attention back to Quinn. “I reviewed the evidence. You think a photo taken at college when he was nineteen years old is going to convict my client? You coulda fooled me into thinking it’s a photo of my nephew Homer.”
“If Homer’s fingerprint and DNA are at the crime scene, like your client’s, he’s in some kinda trouble.”
Pareta dug into her briefcase and came up with a copy of the Princeton photo from the file on Sherman Kraft that had been faxed over to the prosecutor’s office. She peered at the photo, then at Sherman. “Doesn’t look like the same guy to me.”
Quinn pretended to yawn. “Like you said, he was nineteen when
it was taken.”
“I didn’t go to Princeton,” the suspect said. “Went to Yale.”
“Is that where you learned to be a journalist?” Pearl asked. Her voice was weary but level. She had herself in check and knew she could handle this now.
“I’m not a journalist,” the suspect said.
“Then you were lying.”
Pareta laid her hand gently on her client’s arm. “There’s no need to say anything at this point. You’re better off maintaining silence until we know more.”
“It doesn’t matter,” the suspect said.
“Maybe he doesn’t remember committing those murders,” Fedderman said.
Pareta looked thoughtful. “It’s happened before.”
The interrogation room door opened and Renz stuck his head in. “Talk to you for a minute, Quinn?”
Quinn noticed that Renz was sweating. Pushing back his chair, he said, “I’ll be right back.” To the suspect: “Don’t go anywhere.”
“Aren’t one of you people supposed to be the good cop?” Sherman asked, playing the smart-ass now as Quinn was leaving. He must be pretty confident, or was running one helluva bluff.
Quinn had to credit him with balls, even though he felt like grabbing him by the throat and taking the quick route to justice. (But was he thinking of the murders, or of Pearl?)
When he went outside and closed the interrogation room door behind him, he saw Renz standing down the hall by the water fountain. He was splashing cool water on his face, not seeming to mind that he was messing up his shirt and tie.
He straightened up when Quinn approached. Quinn didn’t like the expression on his face that was still beaded with water.
“Prints came back,” Renz said. “They don’t match.”
Quinn was astonished. “They must!”
“Must but don’t.”
“Sweet Jesus!”
“Not only that,” Renz said in a choked voice. “It’s too early for DNA analysis, but the lab says they got some blood off the swab used to extract a culture from the suspect’s gums. It’s type O. The blood on the fingerprint is type A, same as the victim’s.”
“Meaning it’s not from the killer and the DNA isn’t going to match, either.”
“Right. Just like the prints don’t match.”
Quinn felt himself getting light-headed, short of breath. He understood now why Renz was splashing cold water on his face. Though it hadn’t seemed possible until a few minutes ago, they had the wrong man.
He went to the water fountain and got a drink, trying to slow down his thoughts so he could consider each separately and somehow fit them together to form a reasonable whole.
“He has to be our man,” he said, straightening up and wiping his lips with the back of his thumb. “He’s tricking us somehow.”
“I don’t see how,” Renz said hopelessly. “Nobody’s that smart.”
“He’s pretty goddamned smart.”
Renz looked at him and said seriously, “So are you, Quinn.”
Quinn felt the slow anger in him quickening, building in heat and strength. He charged up the hall and yanked open the interrogation room door. Burst inside. Behind him he heard Renz yell, “Quinn!”
Without remembering crossing the room Quinn was standing over the suspect, his huge right fist balled and ready to strike. He was aware of Pearl staring wide-eyed up at him.
Pareta jumped up, looking indignant and terrified. “Detective! Think what you’re doing! Damn it, think!” She’d seen plenty of hard-ass acts in interrogation rooms, and knew this was real.
Quinn hadn’t touched the suspect yet, knowing if he did touch him the game would change, his world would change. The system protected scum like this one, who was gazing up at him unafraid, confident.
The system that failed again and again.
“Who the hell are you?” Quinn demanded in a soft voice that made the flesh on the back of Pearl’s neck crawl. She knew Quinn. She knew what the gentle tone and stillness could portend.
“I’m not Sherman Kraft,” the suspect said calmly. Fear didn’t seem to be one of his emotions.
“I didn’t ask who you weren’t.”
“This has gone far enough!” Pareta said. She darted a glance at the one-way window, knowing Renz, somebody, should be out there somewhere and might stop this.
Pearl looked at Fedderman, who looked at Quinn, back at her, and shook his head no. Pearl was breathing hard. If Jeb Jones wasn’t Sherman Kraft, who was he?
“Jeb!” she said sharply, the name flying out of her without thought. “Who are you?”
“You don’t have to answer that,” Pareta said. “You don’t have to say a goddamned thing to these people.”
These people? “Screw your lawyer!” Pearl said.
“Pearl!” Fedderman waved an arm, cautioning her to be quiet, his unbuttoned shirt cuff flapping like a sail.
The suspect continued looking only at Quinn, matching Quinn’s unyielding stare with one of his own. There was a hardness in him Pearl was seeing for the first time, yet she recognized it. She’d seen it in people who’d bottomed out, entered the abyss and returned from it; and accepted that they were someday going back. She truly understood then that she didn’t know Jeb, not at all.
He said, “I’m Sherman Kraft’s brother.”
Quinn backed away and stood looking at the wall behind the suspect and his attorney. Pearl couldn’t take her eyes off her former lover who’d just become someone else again. Fedderman nervously paced, absently trying to button his loose shirt cuff.
Pareta snapped her shabby briefcase closed and stood up. “I have to know who I’m representing.”
“You’re representing me,” the suspect said, “but you won’t have to for long because I haven’t done anything illegal.”
Pareta thought it over, then sat back down.
“What are you doing in New York?” Quinn asked the suspect.
“As your attorney—” Pareta began.
“We’re doing the same thing you are,” the suspect said to Quinn, ignoring Pareta and cutting off his legal advice. “We’re looking for Sherman.”
“We?” Quinn asked. “You and who else?”
“Sherman’s not my brother, actually. He’s my half-brother.”
“You and who else?” Quinn asked again.
“Our mother.”
50
Now that Maria Cirillo had decided to give up on New York, her mind was at ease. She was simply tired of struggling in this city that moved so fast in the same place, that clanged and chattered constantly inside her head and heart, pressuring her, pressuring her…
Losing her part-time job yesterday as an optometrist’s receptionist on Tenth Street was the final and decisive blow. Dr. Wolff said he was retiring and was winding down his practice, and his daughter was going to act as receptionist and file clerk for the next few months. He offered to give Maria the highest recommendation, and told her this had nothing to do with her work—it was simply time for him and his ill wife to leave the city and retire to Florida. Maria had received a generous severance check, but in New York it wouldn’t last long.
She’d used most of her severance pay to buy an airline ticket to within driving distance of Homestead, Arizona. With her three years at John Jay, she could find work in the town’s small police department. Maria had grown up in Homestead, had friends and family there, and had been the high-school sweetheart of the chief of police. The chief, she’d learned in her last letter from her mother, had recently filed to divorce his wife.
Maria didn’t actually plan on reviving her old romance, but she knew it was one of those things that seemed ordained and just might happen. She was only twenty-six to the chief’s twenty-eight. They were both young. He was handsome, and Maria, with her shoulder-length dark hair, pale complexion, and wide-set brown eyes, was beautiful and knew it. Her small, lithe body hadn’t changed from her high school days. The chief would recognize it. High, firm breasts, a tiny waist, legs not long
but muscular and shapely, a strawberry birthmark near her left nipple, like a second nipple…the chief would remember.
Maria hadn’t had any problem getting dates in New York, in between fighting off the creeps.
She thought about the chief as she stood beneath her lukewarm shower with her head tilted back, facing away from the needles of water that were rinsing shampoo from her hair.
Don’t get ahead of yourself.
But despite her attempts to control her optimism, Homestead sure looked better to her than New York. It could get hot out there, the dry heat, but today was more proof that it could be just as hot in New York, and it was a damp heat. Not like Arizona. She found herself humming as she ran her fingers through her hair to hasten the rinsing process.
Events and circumstances made it clear to Maria that it was time to give up her struggles in New York, to use what she’d learned and return home, if not in triumph, in contentment.
Her flight to Phoenix left in two days. Her lease on her tiny Lower East Side apartment expired in a month. She wasn’t going to argue with the extremely difficult real estate management firm about refunding her month’s rent deposit; she would simply not mail the last month’s rent and forfeit the money.
Maybe she’d finish her schooling at the University of Arizona, close to home, or maybe she’d go to work as a uniformed police officer in Homestead and work her way up through the ranks. She wanted to earn some money. Maria was tired of being poor.
She squinted through running water and turned the faucet handle so the shower got cooler.
The water was almost cold when she turned it off, stepped out from behind her plastic shower curtain, and began toweling herself dry.
When she left the bathroom, still nude, her hair damp and stringy, she immediately noticed the long white box lying in the center of her bed. She stopped and stood staring.
Flowers? Who’d send—
The right side of her head exploded into a pain so white and bright that it blinded her.
She could feel rough carpet nap on the left side of her face.
Must have fallen…Odd…
The pain intensified, and now the room was dark, darker, was floating away from the pain, away from everything…