by John Lutz
When he got back to the lobby, he and Fedderman returned to the car and drove toward Jill Clark’s apartment.
It was time to explain to her that she had a new friend in the building.
When Pearl and Jill first saw each other, Quinn introduced Pearl as Jewel. They wanted to get Jill thinking of her as Jewel right away.
“She’ll be right above you, on the eighth floor,” Quinn said. It was one of three vacant apartments in the building—the nearest to Jill’s. Quinn had told the disinterested landlord the NYPD wanted to rent it for a few weeks to observe someone in the building across the street. They gave him a voucher and he gave them the key.
Jill nodded, still obviously trying to get used to the idea, and still obviously glad someone would be nearby to protect her. She couldn’t believe what might be the truth about Tony. On the other hand, it was impossible for her to dismiss the possibility from her mind. And even now that she’d gone to Quinn and found help, she hadn’t escaped her fear. It was like a malicious live thing in her stomach gnawing on her whenever she dared to forget about it.
This couldn’t be happening. Not to her.
But the creature in Jill’s stomach reminded her that it was indeed happening. And to her.
Jill knew Madeline must have thought the same thing once.
This couldn’t be happening. Not to me.
Not-so-mad Madeline in the morgue.
“Do you have a date coming up with Tony?” Quinn asked.
“Not for a while. He’s out of town for the next few days and will call me when he gets back. He’ll probably want to go out right away. That’s the way it usually is.” She looked as if she wanted to say something else, then stuttered, “I can’t believe—I mean, Tony—”
“I know,” Quinn said. “That’s the reason deceptions having to do with the heart usually work so well. They’re based on undeserved trust. People are susceptible.”
Pearl knew he was right. The heart was a fool.
“Invite him over when he calls,” Quinn said. “Make sure Jewel is there. Or meet him someplace for lunch and bring Jewel along and introduce her. We want it to seem like you and she are fast becoming thick with each other. A close friend of the intended victim will present a real obstacle to E-Bliss.”
“The intended victim…,” Jill said. “That’s me. That’s what I’m having such a hard time believing.”
“Madeline didn’t believe it at first either. And you didn’t believe Madeline.”
Jill started chewing her lower lip and looked as if she might begin to cry. Maybe she was reliving her visit to the morgue.
“My suitcase is upstairs,” Pearl said, to get Jill’s mind on something else, “but I think I’d better stay here with you for an hour or so.” She smiled. “There’s no reason we shouldn’t actually become friends, so we don’t have to pretend.”
“Just remember to do what Jewel tells you,” Quinn said to Jill. “Jewel is very good at what she does, and she has your best interest at heart. She’s here to preserve your life.”
“I know that. She’s here to save me from Tony.”
“From anyone, dear. Jewel doesn’t discriminate.”
Pearl wished he’d get the hell out of there. “Where’s Feds?” she asked. Maybe hurry him along.
“He’s watching the new Madeline’s apartment. We don’t want to approach her yet. We don’t want to approach anyone prematurely and see a lot of people and evidence scatter and disappear.”
Quinn glanced at his watch and stood up from the sofa. “Speaking of disappeared people, I’d better go see if Renz has found any.” He smiled. “So to speak.” He supposed that would be progress. But learning the identities of people who’d supposedly gone to ground wouldn’t reveal whose identities they’d assumed, or that they’d assumed any other identities at all.
But then, sometimes progress was made when it didn’t seem so. Sometimes progress fell into your lap. If your lap was in the right place.
“You’ll be fine,” he assured Jill, as he moved toward the door.
To Pearl: “Leave your cell on, Jewel.”
“Always, these days,” Pearl said.
35
Quinn and Renz met for lunch at Tavern on the Green, where Renz ate at least once a week, because he was in love with the crème brûlée. They had a table with a view out a window onto Central Park and an array of topiary. A tall shrub that Quinn assumed had been trimmed to resemble King Kong loomed over people negotiating a narrow walkway from a paved area where cabs were dropping off and picking up passengers. Quinn watched a woman in a thin summer dress hold the arm of a very old man in a brown suit as they approached the restaurant’s entrance. They resembled each other enough that he figured they were father and daughter, and he wondered what his own daughter, Lauri, was doing right now in California.
“Four people in this area seem to have gone to ground, and for good reason,” Renz said. “Of course there must be more, but these four are obvious.”
“E-Bliss would want them obvious.”
Renz drew a folded sheet of paper from his suit coat pocket. He smoothed it out and propped it on his water glass, keeping his distance so he could read it without his glasses. “Velma Grocci, the wife of mob boss Vin Grocci, cleaned out his bank accounts and ran out on him. Left him a note saying she was never coming back. Not that it would matter much. Vin’s facing several life sentences for ordering various murders, including a hit on an undercover FBI agent. Velma’s life wouldn’t be worth much once hubby went behind the walls.”
“Sounds right,” Quinn said.
“Iris Klinger, suspected of embezzling half a million dollars from the insurance firm she worked for. She skipped bail and disappeared.”
“With the money?”
“Looks that way. Then there’s Marti Ogden, recently of the Upper East Side. Marti’s a woman. Thirty-year-old daughter of Hart Ogden. She and dad fenced stolen diamonds. Somebody tried to double-cross dad and dad killed him. He’s doing twenty-five to life at Elmira. The guy he killed had dangerous friends. We were about to close in on Marti and arrest her for handling stolen property, maybe save her life, when she flew off to Buenos Aires on a chartered flight. No way to know where she went from there, though, if anywhere. We found it odd that she used her real name for the charter. Not smart.”
“Maybe,” Quinn said.
“Number four is Jocko Lucci. Swindled millions from New Jersey casinos and washed the money here with a chain of pizza joints. Another bail jumper.”
“A guy like that made bond?”
“He could afford it. His wife put it up. She died four days after he ran out on her and his bail bondsman. Jocko left a note saying he was leaving the country.”
“The wife died how?”
“A bus ran over her on Second Avenue. Thing is, she had time after finding hubby’s note to call the law and stop him from leaving, but she waited a whole day and he was gone.”
“Or became somebody else,” Quinn said.
“That would be the somebody we’ve got in the morgue, minus head, arms, and legs, and plus a broomstick.”
The waiter arrived with crustless, quarter-cut tuna salad sandwiches, but Quinn knew they were only an unimportant prelude to the crème brûlée.
Renz dutifully took a bite of his sandwich. “There’ve gotta be dozens, maybe hundreds, of other people who’ve disappeared voluntarily, and the law doesn’t get involved,” he said, around a mouthful of tuna salad. “Why should it? Nothing illegal’s been done. Private detectives are sometimes hired to find these folks, but not with much success. If you know what you’re doing or have connections, and the whole wide world to get lost in, you can usually stay lost.”
“Yeah, but the runners in this case would figure to be not only in trouble, but high profile, at least to the police or whoever else might search for them.”
“We won’t stop looking for Marti Ogden, and the Feds won’t stop looking for the other three.”
“Trouble i
s, they’re somebody else now.”
“Trouble is,” Renz agreed. He pushed his plate with the sandwich away. He’d had two bites. The healthy part of his meal was over. Time for dessert, even though Quinn hadn’t had a bite of his sandwich.
Renz sat up straighter and looked around for their waiter, but didn’t see him. Turning his attention back to Quinn, he said, “We’ve got some information on Victor Lamping. He’s thirty-six years old, was born in Baltimore, served in the army in Special Forces in Afghanistan, and was dishonorably discharged four years ago.”
“Discharged for what reason?”
“We’re working on that, but it’s not easy to find out. Special Forces aren’t like other military outfits. They’ve got their own set of rules and it looks like nobody’s up to challenging them. Once we contacted the Military Record Center in St. Louis, everyone in the place clammed up. We couldn’t even find out anything about Lamping from before he joined the military.”
“Well, we know what he’s doing these days.”
The sun had tracked to a slightly different position. Renz was almost in silhouette now against the expanse of bright window looking out on the green lawn and King Kong. Quinn wished he’d brought his sunglasses in with him.
“How do you plan on playing E.Bliss.org?” Renz asked. “Should we shut them down?”
Quinn was aware that Renz knew better; the politician in Renz needed affirmation that the decision wasn’t his alone.
“Not in my judgment,” Quinn said. “When we nail them, I want them nailed hard and for good. So far, we don’t have anything approaching actual proof. We’ll keep watching them while we build our case. The last thing we want at this point is to spook them so they roll everything up and disappear themselves. Jill Clark figures to be their next victim, so we can play for time.”
“Agreed,” Renz said. “But we wouldn’t want the media to discover what we know and when we found out. They’ll think we shoulda broke into E-Bliss’s offices like Eliot Ness and the Untouchables and gunned everybody down. Make sure you keep the media out of it. Cindy Sellers is all over me every day like chiggers.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Quinn said. “We’ve been reasonably successful so far.”
Renz sat high in his chair again. “Hey, there’s our waiter.”
He had his arm halfway up to summon the waiter when his cell phone beeped. He dug the phone out of a pocket, flipped it open, and pressed it to his ear and identified himself. His hound-dog expression became even graver as he went to a different pocket with his free hand and got out a black leather-bound notepad. He said, “Uh-huh,” and then said it several more times while making notes. Renz thanked whoever had called. He flipped the phone closed so it made a loud snapping sound.
“We’ve got another victim,” he said. “Female. What’s left of her was found less than fifteen minutes ago on the Lower East Side.”
He tore off the top sheet of paper containing the information from his notepad and handed it across the table to Quinn. He slipped the notepad back in his pocket, then settled down in his chair.
“Round up your team and go,” he said. “I’m waiting for dessert.”
36
Palmer Stone sat in his office at E-Bliss.org and looked across his desk at Victor Lamping. For the first time, he was worried about his business partner and longtime associate. It wasn’t so much anything Victor had done. It was more his behavior. He seemed distant sometimes, distracted. This could be bad for business.
On a table near the office window, a small TV was tuned to local cable news. The volume was muted, but closed-caption lettering appeared at the bottom of the screen. It was all about politics, sports, celebrity name-calling, a man who’d set a hamburger-eating record.
“How do you explain it?” Palmer asked.
He wasn’t yet aware that Charlotte Lowenstein’s torso had been found. What was the delay? He’d expected the news on TV hours ago.
Victor knew what he was talking about. “I don’t explain it,” he said. “Gloria and I did our work, including placing the object where it was sure to be discovered. I wouldn’t worry. It has to be found soon. It isn’t the kind of thing people consciously step over.”
Stone’s desk chair was located where he could see his reflection in a small framed mirror. He glanced at the suave middle-aged man in the mirror and automatically adjusted his imported silk tie. He always dressed well, leaving his suit coat on in the office, though it was rare that a client or anyone else ever dropped in. Almost all of E-Bliss.org’s business was done via the Internet.
His hand came away from the straightened tie knot as he saw the increasingly familiar faraway look transform Victor’s eyes. That look seemed to occur off and on during the first few days after a client deletion. Where had Victor gone? He certainly wasn’t in the office.
Daydreaming didn’t suit Victor, who, like Stone, was a dedicated businessman who let nothing interfere with the pursuit of profit. What Victor and Gloria did in the course of their work for E-Bliss.org was for them simply part of the job. Or so Stone had thought. He hadn’t seen Gloria since the Charlotte Lowenstein deletion, but he doubted there was anything different about her behavior. Victor seemed to be another matter.
Stone smiled, making him look like a kindly father on a TV sitcom. “Something bothering you, Victor?”
Victor’s attentiveness returned like a lamp switching on. He was back in the here and now. “No. Why do you ask?”
Stone shrugged. “You seem preoccupied lately.”
Victor, in some ways a younger version of Stone, smiled like the dutiful son in the same sitcom. “I’m fine, Palmer.”
“And Gloria?”
“The same.”
“The messy part of the work you two do, it’s simply business, Victor. Like a medical procedure. The termination of life, the dissection, and the diversionary act—it’s all about money, and nothing else. Of course, I can understand how you might form something like an affection for the deleted client.”
“I guard against that from the beginning,” Victor said.
“Of course you do. What about Gloria?”
“You’d have to ask her.”
“Do you think she might have gotten more involved than she should have with the last client? Charlotte?”
Victor laughed. “Palmer, she’s…Gloria.” He placed his elbows on his knees, leaning forward. “What’s bothering you, Palmer?”
“In the kind of work you and Gloria undertake, there are two dangers. One is developing a revulsion for what you must do. The other is getting to like that part of the job too much.”
“There’s no danger of either of those things happening,” Victor said. “Not with me, and not with Gloria.”
“Fine,” Stone said, sitting back in his leather upholstered executive chair and beaming with satisfaction.
But he’d seen the change of light in Victor’s eyes and knew Victor was lying. The question was, who had the problem? Was it Gloria, or Victor? And what was the problem—revulsion, or too much attraction?
“Ah!” Stone said.
He was staring at the TV. Local cable news was running the story about another Torso Murders victim. The torso of an unidentified woman had been found only hours ago on the Lower East Side. Palmer knew the police would soon note the similarities of the crime with the other Torso Murders, and they would match at least one of the two bullets removed from in or near the heart with the gun that had killed the previous victims.
Victor was also staring at the TV. “Feel better now, Palmer?”
“Infinitely,” Stone said. “Nothing makes me happier than business as usual.”
If only Victor were as usual.
37
Quinn decided that sex with Linda Chavesky was better each time. He knew it had to do with trust. They’d both entered the country of lovers cautiously, knowing now there was no turning back. But they were learning and were more at ease with each other every time.
Of course, the
re were adjustments for each of them to make. Right now, lying next to Linda in his bed, watching the dying light around the blinds indicate the sun was about to set, Quinn would have enjoyed smoking a cigar. He could imagine himself doing that with Linda propped up beside him smoking an after-sex cigarette. But he knew it was only a mental image and would never become reality. Hell, for all he knew, smoking a cigar in bed might have become illegal in New York when he wasn’t paying attention.
It hadn’t been that long ago when Pearl had lain there beside him in postcoital languor, but it seemed to have happened in another world. It wasn’t so much time as it was events that turned life’s pages.
Quinn did still think of Pearl as more than simply a colleague who happened to be his former lover. When Pearl had found out about Linda, he’d read something in her eyes. Suddenly, with their romantic relationship supplanted by another for him, a part of her wanted him back. But only a part of her.
Maybe it was always that way with ex-lovers, even after tempestuous relationships. A reflexive thing. The heart refusing to surrender completely a piece of its past. He did love Linda, but he wondered in an abstract way if a part of him wanted Pearl back.
“What are you thinking?” Linda asked.
“That the Yankees should trade for pitching.”
“I thought maybe about the latest Torso Murder victim.”
Images of corrupt flesh, exposed bone, dried blood, and fecal matter cascaded through Quinn’s mind. He went quietly mad for a few seconds.
“I’ve learned to push that kind of stuff aside,” he said.
“Are you happy?”
“About the Yankees?”
She laughed and poked a rigid forefinger between his ribs. It hurt quite a bit.
She nestled deeper in the bed, lying on her side next to him so she could look him in the eye over the arc of her pillow. “Nift is keeping a few things back about the latest torso victim,” she said. “He’s obviously decided to delay as long as possible before sending the postmortem information along to Renz.”