by John Lutz
Maybe later.
Still high on caffeine or Tony Lake, Jill now began to walk.
It was interesting how her nervousness had left her only moments after sitting down with Tony. And their conversation had flowed so smoothly. Most of it, she realized, had been about her. She told herself not to be so selfish next time they met. But he had a way of making her feel important and the natural subject of the conversation. He wanted to know all about her. He was genuinely interested in her. More than interested—fascinated.
Yes, fascinated was the word.
She smiled at her happiness that lay right there in front of her like a gold coin waiting to be picked up.
Face it, doomster, the meeting was a roaring success.
Now and then in this crappy, difficult world, something went wonderfully right.
As she strolled away from Has Beans toward her subway stop, Jill actually found herself whistling.
17
The traffic light at the intersection was a DON’T WALK, so Jill stopped and stood with a few other people waiting for it to change. Since she had on her sweats and Nikes, she began idly jogging in place on the sidewalk, her body revolving in a slow circle. She could feel a slight bouncing of her breasts, but she didn’t mind. Let people look. Let them guess how happy she was. Someone passing in a car honked the horn and shouted something.
At me?
For me?
Almost certainly.
As she turned to face back the way she’d come, her mood suddenly changed for the worse. She saw a woman, a street person in filthy clothes and with unkempt dirty blond hair, standing about fifty feet away and openly staring at her.
What bothered Jill was that the woman seemed oddly familiar.
Then she realized why. Jill was sure she’d seen her across the street from Has Beans when she and Tony had emerged from the coffee bar. Jill remembered the pang of pity she’d felt for the woman, who’d been standing alone and motionless as if lost, clutching a wrinkled brown paper sack beneath her right arm.
The woman was staring at her now in a way that evoked more fear than pity. As if there was some kind of connection between them.
Jill didn’t want a connection. With a little bad luck, she could be this woman. Maybe only her dwindling checking account was the difference between them now. Homelessness happened. This city was cruel and could crush.
The woman took a faltering step toward her.
Jill looked away, continuing to jog in place, turning her back to her.
The woman had to be close now. Getting closer.
Jill continued facing away from the sad specter of a horrifying future and stared hard at the traffic signal across the intersection.
Change, damn you. Change!
The light did change.
Jill lengthened out her foot motion and jogged across the intersection. After veering around an old woman pushing a shopping cart full of groceries, she accelerated into a brisk run. Her rhythmic arm motion and the strain on her thighs felt great, liberating.
The homeless woman didn’t figure to be a runner. Jill didn’t have to glance back to know she was leaving the ragged figure behind. Her bleak alternative future receding into her past.
Running faster made Jill somehow breathe easier.
On the way home from work the next evening, Jill saw the woman again. It was when Jill stopped to look at a shoe sale display in a small shop. There, superimposed in the show window over the red high-heeled pumps she was considering, was the woman’s reflection. She had to be close, not more than ten feet behind Jill.
There was something about the woman’s reflected image that horrified Jill to the point that Jill was faintly nauseated.
To be in this woman’s thoughts, her intentions…
It wasn’t simply that Jill knew for sure now that the woman had truly been following her, had for some reason fixated on her. It was more a creepy certainty that she’d seen the woman before, other than just that evening outside Has Beans.
How long has she been following me? Watching me?
Had they met? Did they somehow know each other?
Had she simply pegged Jill as a soft touch, wanted a handout and was too shy to ask? It was a possible explanation. Maybe the poor thing was driven more by hunger than malice.
Either way, Jill had to find out.
Better to face your fears.
Jill decided to turn around and simply ask the woman, get to the bottom of this nonsense. She’d look the woman in the eye. Force a smile. Force a question.
Do we know each other?
She knew from experience that when you confronted your terror, it could quickly dissipate.
And this woman, determined, homeless, terrified her.
This will all end in a moment.
She tensed her muscles and whirled to face what waited behind her.
The woman was gone.
18
Mexico City, two months earlier
Maria Sanchez lay next to her husband, Jorge, in a circular bed in the honeymoon suite of the plush Hotel Casa Grande on the busy Paseo de la Reforma. They were on the twelfth floor, far above the noise and bustle in the streets below.
The only sound in the room was Jorge’s even breathing, but Maria knew he wasn’t asleep. He’d seldom slept at all the last few weeks because of the pressure. Political winds had shifted, and Jorge Sanchez, once an almost invincible drug lord and master of cocaine, was now vulnerable. New drug money, in larger amounts, had found its way to Jorge’s friends in the government and made him dispensable. Over the past few months, routes into the United States had closed or become too dangerous. Just last week a sleek cruiser running drugs into southern Florida had been intercepted at sea, actually boarded after two of its crew had been gunned down from another, faster boat. After the cargo was transferred, the surviving members of the crew were allowed to live. They, along with the boat, might prove useful to Jorge’s successor.
The alarm by the bed began to buzz, and Jorge sat up immediately and turned it off. He was a lean, muscular man, dark and with a black, carefully trimmed beard and mustache. The fierce downward trim of the mustache was overmatched by the liquid softness of his brown eyes.
In the silence after the alarm, he lay back down and drew Maria to him. Both were nude, and sexually satiated after last night, but for a moment Maria thought he might want to make love again.
Unlike her husband, Maria had a light complexion, though her long, straight hair was auburn, like his. Her features were symmetrical and well sculpted, and her body was trim and athletic. Maria was the daughter of staid Midwesterners and had met Jorge three years ago when she was an art student at UCLA and he was studying business. Supposedly. What Jorge was really doing in the United States was establishing a drug distribution network.
With Jorge’s help, Maria’s basic grasp of Spanish soon improved, and their friendship quickly developed into a love that transcended any cultural differences. In fact, it gained the momentum of a freight train, and there was no leaving the rails without a fatal smashup.
When Maria learned from one of his friends that Jorge was a major drug dealer, she was thrilled rather than repelled. She confided this to him, and their love affair became even more heated. The friend who’d told her about Jorge disappeared. Maria never asked why or where to.
She regretted nothing of the life that had led to them being here in this room at the Hotel Casa Grande. Her family considered it sinful, and they didn’t know the half of it. With Jorge, boundaries fell one after another, and behavior changed, along with what was unacceptable. Life was something to be seized. If it was selfish to live it to the fullest, so be it. People might not approve. Screw them, Maria thought.
Jorge didn’t want to make love again. He leaned back away from her and rested his head on his pillow. The air conditioner kicked in with a soft rushing sound, almost like water flowing, sending a cooling breeze like a benediction down from the vent near the bed. It might not have been so plea
sant lying here under different circumstances.
“A sad day for us,” Jorge said. “After this morning, we won’t be able to see each other for quite a while.”
Maria scooted nearer to him on the bed and kissed him on the lips. “I understand,” she said.
And he knew she did. And she accepted. He smiled. “You are unlike any other woman.”
“So is every other woman, but no other woman is yours.”
His smile widened. “That is because you would cut off my testicles.”
“You are so right. And I love you so much.”
“And I you.”
They kissed again and she moved away from him and climbed out of bed. She didn’t see any point in drawing out what for both of them was going to be a painful but necessary parting.
Raising her arms high, she stretched the length of her sleek body. “I’ll shower first.”
“Perhaps I’ll join you. Save the hotel some water.”
She paused and grinned at him. “Yes, you’ve always been interested in hotel water conservation.”
“If it involves you, I find it a fascinating subject.”
An hour later, Maria left the room first. She rode the elevator down to the lobby, walked to an archway beyond the reservation desk, and found a table in the coffee shop.
She ordered an espresso and sat calmly sipping it, waiting for Jorge to finish dressing and come downstairs.
As she sipped her espresso and gazed out the coffee shop’s wide window that provided a view of the street, she noticed two identical black Volkswagen Jettas parked at the curb near the hotel’s entrance. Though they were in the way of taxis, and a shuttle bus, if one were to arrive, the uniformed doorman was obviously ignoring them.
He also ignored the three men in dark suits who hurried past him, walking side by side. From her table, Maria could see beyond the entrance arch as the three men entered the lobby and strode across the terrazzo floor toward the elevators.
Only there were four of them now, all walking in step. One suddenly veered off and stood leaning against a wall with his arms crossed, staying well out of the way of guests and bellhops scurrying past. Through the window, Maria saw a third black Jetta. A van peeled away from the traffic and parked directly across the street. Several men emerged from it and began to cross.
Maria’s heart was hammering as she drew her cell phone from her purse and called upstairs.
After breaking the brief connection, she kept her eyes trained on the lobby, and a few minutes later there was Jorge. He must have passed the men in the elevators, descending in a different car as they were going up. He was hurriedly making his way through the lobby, his shirt untucked, his hair uncombed. He didn’t glance toward her as he passed the coffee shop entrance and walked faster toward the street exit.
Quickly he passed from her sight.
Almost immediately she heard gunshots and screaming. She watched through the window as the figure with the half-tucked shirt came into view and began to run. His pace faltered, and red splotches appeared on the broad back of his white shirt.
Then he stopped, raised both hands, and collapsed dying on the sidewalk.
People in the hotel and out in the street were rising from where they’d sought shelter and moving around now. Some of them were running. People were hurrying from across the street, weaving between the stopped cars. All were moving faster and faster toward the scene of the shooting.
Maria rose from her table, hurried to the lobby, and joined the throng of people rushing to see what had happened. Car horns were honking. There was much shouting. The wailing of sirens drifted over the city.
Like banshees, she thought. They sound like banshees mourning for Jorge.
But she knew the sirens meant only more police closing in to help establish and maintain order.
Out on the sidewalk, she avoided elbows and shoulders, pushed her way against the flow of the crowd, and slipped away.
19
New York, the present
One of those days.
Quinn sat at his desk, leaning far back in his swivel chair, and watched the rain fall outside the window of the office on West Seventy-ninth Street. It must have been cool where the rain fell from, because steam was rising when the angled drops struck the warmed street and concrete sidewalk.
Pearl was, for a change, in her chair, rather than perched on the edge of her desk. Fedderman was slouched in his desk chair nursing a mug of coffee. They were looking at the rain, too, aware of the constant trickling noise from a ledge above the window, and the occasional rattle of the loose pane when the summer wind kicked up. The city had slowed perceptibly, unaccustomed to such a gray morning in midsummer. This was somehow more depressing than the relentless heat they’d been enduring. The mood from outside had penetrated inside to the office.
Fedderman lifted his coffee mug and observed it carefully, as if he suspected a leak.
“We’re not,” he said, “getting a helluva lot done this morning.”
“I am,” Pearl said.
Quinn adjusted his chair slightly so he could look at her. She seemed small in the black vinyl swivel chair that was identical to his. Small and unproductive. Was she serious?
“I’ve been thinking,” she said.
“Oh, Christ!” Fedderman said. “Let’s hope it hasn’t borne fruit.”
Pearl looked at him as if he were an insect. “But it has. It’s a big juicy theory.”
“Like with relativity?”
“Let’s hear her out, Feds,” Quinn said. He leaned farther back in his chair, as if to gain distance from Pearl and her theory.
“You’re going to fall on your ass,” Pearl told him.
“Is that your theory?”
“No, it’s about our killer.”
“I assumed,” Quinn said, with a smile.
They all listened to the patter of rain for a moment. Then Pearl sat up higher and leaned forward with her elbows on her desk. “It’s possible that the victims’ unidentifiable torsos are left where they’re sure to be found not as the killer’s calling card, or simply because they’re deemed untraceable, or even to taunt authorities, but so the police will assume the women were victims of a serial killer.”
Quinn and Fedderman stared at her.
“I hate to point out the obvious,” Fedderman said, “but whoever killed those women is by definition a serial killer.”
“But maybe one who kills with a logical purpose,” Pearl said, “who might have a real and practical motive.”
“They all think they have a real and practical motive,” Fedderman said. “It always turns out to be psycho squirrel shit.”
“Maybe not this time, though. Our guy might be pretending to be a psychosexual killer so that’s what we’ll be hunting.”
“The old serial killer diversion,” Fedderman said. “While we’re searching for a killer, our perp might actually have a bunch of unpaid traffic tickets.”
Quinn thought, You seldom hear people say perp anymore. Where did it go?
“If it’s an act,” Fedderman said, “it’s sure as hell a convincing one.”
“So why’s our perp leaving the torsos and concealing the rest of the bodies?” Quinn asked, thinking it felt odd to say perp.
“I’m not sure. All I’m saying is, it might really be a kind of diversion, so we’re looking for a nutcase killer and not for whatever else he is,” Pearl said.
“The weather’s getting to you,” Fedderman said.
“Screw you and the weather,” Pearl said.
Quinn was silent. He knew this was the kind of thinking that made Pearl such a talented detective. He also knew she wouldn’t easily turn loose of the idea.
“Are you convinced of this?” he asked her.
“Of course not. I told you it was a theory.”
“Did you say crackpot theory?” Fedderman asked.
Pearl ignored him and pointedly addressed only Quinn: “Here’s where we are, spinning our wheels: We check the mental
hospitals and psycho wards in New York and surrounding states, and there’s no one missing who likes to carve up people or animals. No one with those characteristics has been released from prison lately. We check with other cities and there are no similar cases. We use Helen’s profile as our guide and it gets us nowhere. That’s because her profile’s wrong. He’s not a nutcase in the conventional sense, and thinking he is throws us off the scent. That’s the object of his game.”
“He has the earmarks of a genuine psychosexual serial killer,” Quinn said. “He kills each time in the same manner, ritualistically dismembers his victims and leaves grisly calling cards we’re sure to find, uses the same gun we’re sure to match with the bullets, does the sexual mutilation and penetration with the sharpened wooden broomstick—”
“The goddamned furniture oil,” Fedderman interrupted.
“It all might be part of his plan,” Pearl said calmly. “Don’t you see? He’s creating a profile for our profiler.”
“Jesus,” Fedderman said.
“It might be part of a plan,” Quinn said, “but so far there isn’t any evidence that it is. So we have to proceed on that basis.”
“Consider the way everything is too damned pat,” Pearl said. “That’s its own kind of evidence.”
“If it is,” Quinn said, “what are we gonna do with it?”
“There’s a good question,” Fedderman said.
Pearl sighed, knowing they were both right. “Yeah,” she said. “What can we do?”
“Keep it in mind, is what,” Quinn said. “That’s the kind of evidence it is, the kind you keep in mind.”
“Sure,” Pearl said. “I’ll do that.”
Quinn knew she would.
Fedderman stood up and wandered over to the coffee brewer. He glanced back at Pearl. It was obvious that he felt he might have been too hard on her.
“It’s the weather,” he said. “You want some coffee, Pearl?”