by John Lutz
His dark roots were showing.
Less then five minutes after showering and applying additional dye to his hair, Sherman was seated at his desk. He was dressed only in his robe and slippers, and was poring over the 1964 Meredith Hotel renovation blueprints. Already he’d formulated a plan. It only needed a bit more time, a little more research and attention to detail.
And, of course, some cooperation, but that would be easy enough to obtain. Even a pleasure.
Problem solved.
No riddle in the mail this time, Quinn. No note. No game. No rattle before the strike.
Only the surprise.
If it weren’t so early in the day, he’d pour a generous Jack Daniel’s and congratulate himself.
The surprise. The revelation.
When they would share the terrible knowledge.
Maybe, in the few last terrified seconds of her life, Mom would be proud of him.
61
Lauri hoped she’d pecked out the right phone number. She still felt woozy from last night. That would teach her not to drink too much. Or love too much. Three drinks. She remembered Joe telling her that had been her total. There was a lot of last night missing from her memory, but what she did remember she liked.
Joe…What a wonderful lover he was…wonderful everything!
Sitting on the edge of her bed, listening to Joe’s phone ring and ring on the other end of the connection, another dizzy spell made her sway slightly. Was this what it was to be lovesick?
Three more rings.
She was about to hang up when he answered the phone.
“It’s Lauri,” she said. “Remember me?”
“Forever. I was hoping you’d call.”
“How come you took so long to pick up?”
“I was in the shower. Slept late this morning. I was really tired. Can’t figure out why.”
She smiled. “Try harder and I bet you’ll remember.”
“You’re right. It must have something to do with why I was hoping it was you on the phone. You sleep okay?”
“Deeper than I ever slept in my life.”
“Any regrets?”
“God, no!” She sounded choked. She could see the taut material of her blouse over her breasts vibrating in time with her beating heart. “Now I’m sitting here thinking how much I miss you.”
“What a sweet thing to say!” His voice broke with sincerity.
She was glad to know she wasn’t the only one with a tight throat. “It’s only been nine hours and twenty-six minutes.”
“Way too long,” he said. He always seemed to know exactly what to say. Unlike…someone else.
“We can do something about that,” she told him.
He laughed softly. She saw in her mind’s eye the promise in his brown eyes, the curve of his soft upper lip. She had his face memorized and wanted the image never to fade away. “Problem is,” he said, “I have to take a flight out of town shortly on business. I’ll be gone for a few days.”
She swallowed her disappointment. Her alarm. Was he brushing her off? Lying? “I could go with you to the airport and see you off.” Don’t sound like such a fawning fool!
“Too late for that. I’ve already got a car coming.” He was silent for a few beats while her heart plummeted. Then: “Lauri, I was thinking of something special for the evening of the day I get back.”
“It can’t be more special than our last evening together.”
He laughed again. “This would be a different kind of special. Dinner at one of the best restaurants I know, the Longitude Room in the Meredith Hotel. It’s not the Hungry U but I think you’ll like it.”
“Will I like afterward?”
“If I have anything to do with it.”
“You’ll have everything to do with it.”
“Not another cab ride,” he said. “You deserve better than that. I’ll reserve a room. We can wake up together and order room service the next morning.”
Her heart was on the rise now, soaring. She was determined to seem calm and sophisticated. “Sounds wonderful.” That was good, not too eager. Very adult.
“I noticed you have a cell phone. Give me your number and I’ll call you when I’m back in the city.”
She did, in her newfound calm voice. Her emotions were still whirling, but not so fast. She had a handle on the situation now.
“Don’t mention this to anyone,” he said. “I don’t want any trouble for you while I’m out of town.”
“Trouble?”
“You might not have noticed, Lauri, but a certain someone is almost as hung up on you as I am.”
“Wormy? I can’t see him causing any real trouble. He’s not much more than an annoyance.”
“You might be surprised.”
“Now you sound like my—”
“Who?”
“Nobody. If you think it’s wise, I’ll keep quiet about us. I’m not the blabbermouth type anyway.”
“I know you’re not. I’ll call you soon as I get back, darling.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
They hung up without him saying he loved her. That was okay. Darling would do for now. Lauri wasn’t discouraged. She knew something about men. He’d get around to the L word. She’d see to that.
“He’ll make you wait,” Helen the profiler said. “He’s tantalizing you. Stringing out the suspense.”
“This isn’t a mystery novel,” Quinn said.
“He thinks it is. And he’s the main character.”
“Doesn’t the main character usually get the girl?” Fedderman said.
“He’s gotten the girl too many times already,” Renz said. He was seated behind his desk, chewing on a dead cigar, maybe trying to get across to them that he obeyed regulations and never smoked when he was in his office, which was a crock. He carefully propped the cigar in a thick glass ashtray converted to a paper-clip container, as if the cigar were burning and he didn’t want it to go out. “This is the morning of the fifth day for our Myrna-as-bait operation. Pretty soon I’ll have to reassign some people so they can chase down criminals who aren’t shadows.”
“Smooth move,” Pearl said. “It’ll go over great in the media if Mom gets snuffed.”
Quinn threw a glance her way. They’d all been thinking the same thing, but she had to say it.
“I don’t intend to let that happen,” Renz said, looking hard at Pearl, “and I don’t appreciate the sarcasm.”
Pearl said nothing.
“I’ll take your silence as an apology,” Renz said, after about a minute and a half of nothing but traffic sounds from outside.
Good as you’re going to get, Quinn thought. He glanced over warningly at Fedderman, who looked about to swallow his tongue. Fedderman seemed to find nothing in life so funny as Pearl being Pearl.
Renz pressed on. “I came up with an idea. Thought I’d run it past you.”
Helen the profiler, who’d been leaning with a bony hand on the window frame, straightened up her lanky body and paid closer attention.
“Let’s hear it,” Quinn said, shifting in his chair and trying to sound enthusiastic. He reminded himself that Renz was a good cop when he wasn’t trying to think too hard. His shrewdness seemed to be confined to his political maneuvering.
“We need to get this psycho off the dime,” Renz said. “Get him to bust a move. I think Helen would agree that psychologically he needs some kind of jolt.”
“Sort of maybe,” Helen said cautiously. She crossed her long arms, an impressive show of muscle and tendon.
“He’s feeling the increasing pressure, you said,” Renz told her. “Especially now with Mom in town.”
“True,” Helen said.
“So it might not take much to prompt him into action.”
“True.”
Quinn was thinking that so far he hadn’t heard an idea, hoping Pearl wouldn’t point that out. He glanced over at her and she favored him with a razor-thin smile. Mind reader.
“I think we need to use the
media again,” Renz said. “Just a short piece about Myrna still being in town, along with a photograph. It could be taken in an interrogation room, or maybe even in this office, and we say she’s given a deposition, quote her as pleading with her wayward son to give himself up.”
“Nothing new so far,” Quinn said, getting impatient and also figuring he might beat Pearl to the punch. He could almost hear Pearl ticking.
“You’ll be standing over Myrna,” Renz said to Quinn. “Maybe with your hand on her shoulder, and you and she could be looking into each other’s eyes. Drive our sicko killer wild.”
“Hint at a romantic attachment?” Pearl asked.
Renz nodded. “You got it. Hint broadly.”
Fedderman rubbed his chin thoughtfully, his white shirt cuff just beginning to come unbuttoned. “Myrna’s still a good-looking woman,” he said. “It’d be easy to believe an attachment.”
“Maybe you should be it,” Pearl said.
Fedderman looked aghast. “I’m hardly in her league.”
“Such modesty, when it’s convenient. Other times you’re Brad Pitt.”
“It’s Quinn he hates,” Helen said. “Quinn is his great nemesis, maybe even the lost father figure who deserted him. Our killer simultaneously hates and respects Quinn.”
Many do, Pearl thought.
“So he’s all the more likely to respond,” Renz said.
“It’s possible he’ll respond with an oedipal rage,” Helen said, “vented at his mother rather than Quinn. When it comes to people he loves, hates, and fears, all at the same time, Mom’s at the top of the list. It’s Mom he’s repetitiously killing.”
“Isn’t this all getting way too complicated?” Pearl asked.
“Maybe not,” Fedderman said. “We’re dealing with a complicated psycho.”
“It’ll all seem simple when the cuffs are clicked on him,” Renz said. He stuck the dead cigar back in his mouth.
“Or a bullet brings him down,” Fedderman added.
“I di’n’ hear ’at,” Renz said around the cigar.
Quinn wasn’t sure he liked this at all. Still, if it might work…
He glanced over at Helen, who was idly rocking back and forth simply by flexing her long muscles, looking more like a decathlon champion than a psychologist. He knew her background. She wasn’t just Helen Iman, NYPD. She was Dr. Iman, Psy.D. The expert in the room.
She caught him looking at her, misreading him. Maybe.
“Have you ever secretly thought of sleeping with Myrna Kraft?” she asked him.
“If I were a spider.”
Pearl was silent.
There was a mood in the office no one quite understood.
Renz removed the dead cigar from his mouth. “So whaddya think?” he asked the room in general.
“I think it’s a brilliant idea,” Helen said. “But be ready for whatever you wake up.”
62
The sun cleansed, purified, burned away whatever festered and gave pain.
At least for a while.
The Butcher sat on a bench at the Seventy-second Street entrance to Central Park and tilted his face up to the warm sunshine. He’d dreamed again last night and had been in no mood for breakfast this morning. He was tired from lack of sleep, and there was a sour taste beneath his tongue that persisted no matter what he did.
Not that he couldn’t shrug off his dreams when he was awake.
Not that he couldn’t at all times differentiate dreams from reality.
Except during his dreams, of course.
He almost shivered with the chill he felt even in the warm sun.
After his morning shower, he’d taken a walk, thinking that might stir his appetite and then he’d stop somewhere and have at least orange juice and coffee. And of course he wanted to read the morning Post he’d picked up at a kiosk during his stroll to the park. He was always interested in what the media had to say about the killer who so baffled the police and intrigued the public. Even the grand gray lady, the Times, the paper of record, sometimes ran news items on the Butcher, and right on the front page, above the fold.
Sherman smiled up at the sun. He’d found fame, in an anonymous way. Had he always sought fame? Or had it only been after he’d begun to act on what he’d known, what he’d felt?
He cautioned himself that it could be dangerous, this hunger for publicity. It was a hunger that at times consumed its own compulsion. Sherman had read the literature on serial killers and knew as much about them as Quinn. Well, maybe not that much. Quinn had actually met serial killers, whereas Sherman merely…was one. His smile broadened and he almost laughed out loud, sharing the joke with the sun.
He was still tired and his legs felt heavy, but he was definitely feeling better. He’d sit here a while, read the paper, and enjoy the day in its full and early bloom. After glancing around the park and then out at the busy avenue, he drew his reading glasses from his shirt pocket, slipped them on and adjusted the frames at the bridge of his nose, and opened the paper in his lap.
Ah! Interesting.
He leaned over the paper, peering at the photograph on page two. Not merely interesting. Astounding! Mom and Quinn, in some kind of room, perhaps an office. Mom was seated at a table, a sheet of paper before her, and a pen in her hand. Quinn was standing close by, just behind her, his hand resting gently on her shoulder near the curve of her neck. She was staring not at the paper or camera but up into Quinn’s eyes.
And the way he was looking at her!
How dare—
Sherman felt a cold, cold pressure just beneath his heart. He closed his eyes and waited until it went away before he looked again at the photo in the Post.
Now he smiled. Making himself arrange his facial muscles at first, but then the smile became genuine. Reason had supplanted emotion.
This photograph was obviously a trick. He laughed out loud, a kind of strangled giggle. Quinn! He didn’t hate him, didn’t want to kill Quinn. After all, he’d chosen Quinn. And Quinn hadn’t let him down. Sherman laughed again, this time in admiration at the wiliness of his opponent. The old “Killer’s Mother Signs Statement” trick, but with a twist. Wonderful! Audacious! Mom as bait while having an affair with the lead detective. All a lie, of course. Quinn had come up with something new, something innovative, that could be added to all the other misdirected claptrap written and spoken about serial killers and their mothers.
Misguided and unhappy professors in musty classrooms or lecture halls half full of bored students, TV chatterhead pop psychologists mouthing the tired phrases of others, spoon-feeding pap in sound bites to the millions, what did they know? Who were they to presume?
Well, let Quinn be smug for a while. Sherman knew better. Who was this asshole detective really? And how innovative was he? Did he think he’d invented flush toilets or the forward pass?
He realized he was clenching his jaw. No anger. No need and no reason for anger.
Sherman knew the police were getting anxious, wondering if he’d actually rise to the bait and confirm their cleverness. They were the ones feeling the pressure. They were planting staged photographs in the newspapers. They were the sources of amusement being laughed at for their futility. They were the ones lost in the swamp.
As he stood up from the bench, he folded the newspaper, then walked over to a nearby trash receptacle and dropped it in with the rest of the detritus of humanity.
Then he began to walk, still not hungry.
Around two that afternoon he fell asleep in his recliner and dreamed of Quinn and Mom gazing at each other…that way. Of them doing other things. Of Sam Pickett and the sounds that had come from Mom’s bedroom, the squeal of the bedsprings and crashing of the headboard against the wall, over and over and over until it became like distant thunder that wouldn’t quit, that wouldn’t allow peace or safety, that remained fear on the horizon.
The squeal of the bedsprings!
The squeal of the bedsprings!
There was no way to stop it, or to
stop the distant thunder from moving closer and closer.
The past threatened like a summer storm, roiling the darkness of his mind, and other sounds and images rose unbidden to the surface of Sherman’s memory: the lapping of black water in moonlight, the persistent droning of insects, the smooth dark movement in shadowed glades, the shrill scream of the power saw cutting through—
The squeal—
The storm grew in intensity and roared in on him like a hurricane.
It gathered him struggling to its bosom, and he surrendered to it.
He expected darkness when he opened his eyes, but light flooded in through the window. He sat for a while staring out at the city, still there and not a dream, miles of soaring stone and glass and angular stark shadow and bright sunlight. The past was over and gone. Outside the window was the present.
Now! Real!
He swallowed his fear and the bitterness of sleep and dreams.
A trick. The photo in the newspaper looked real but it was a trick.
But the dream echoed and flashed in his mind and Sherman was furious, perspiring, his heart hammering.
Calm, damn it! Calm…A trick…
He recalled fishing in the swamp, the bait taken, the hook bare. Sometimes a gator would yank at the line, breaking it and sweeping away hook and bait with an invisible awesome power. Quinn would learn there were creatures you didn’t fish for. Quinn could never imagine. He’d never been where Sherman had been, or learned the hard lessons. You didn’t stalk creatures that regarded bait and hunter as gift and prey.
Quinn could never imagine.
Sherman reached for his cell phone and pecked out Lauri’s cell phone number. Cell to cell, like a living organism. His heart slowed its pace and he was breathing evenly at last.
She answered on the third ring.
“Hi,” he said. “Miss me?”
63
Undercover officer Jack Neeson was playing the bellhop, pansy uniform and all. Shakespeare or whoever the hell had said it was right—life was like a stage and we were all actors. Sometimes Neeson was a bum, sometimes a drug dealer, sometimes a straight-arrow WASP with a smile and a line, sometimes a low-life asshole in the rackets. Always he was a cop.