by John Lutz
Coulter gleefully stomped the accelerator. The truck responded as if it were alive and born for the challenge.
Small branches whipped and scratched against the truck’s steel sides. Welcome sounds. They meant the swamp was opening its arms for him and freedom could be had. He drove like a maniac. More dark water splashed from time to time, some of it splattering on the windshield.
Coulter used the truck’s wipers and forged on. The road had become a narrow, muddy tunnel through the swamp. That was fine with him. The bumpier and muddier the better. This was exactly the kind of place that would soon bog down a low-slung car.
After a while, Coulter chanced a glance in the rearview mirror and saw through the trees a glimmer of headlights, far behind. A few seconds later he looked again and saw only blackness.
He backed off a bit on the accelerator, driving more carefully. His breathing was ragged and his heart was pounding as if it might break a rib. He knew he wasn’t out of the woods yet, literally, but he couldn’t help letting out a loud whoop. He’d shaken them.
Desperado on the run!
Goddamn he was something! He’d shaken them!
For now.
49
Wes Nobbler and Greeve had gotten to Ruth Malpass’s apartment first and confiscated her notebook computer. After that, it was seconds for Quinn and his team. When they requested the laptop, they were informed that Nobbler and Greeve were the real NYPD, but that they’d share.
Quinn informed Renz of this, and Renz promptly phoned and gave Nobbler one of his better ass-chewings and made it clear who was working the Torso Murders case.
It wasn’t Nobbler.
Nobbler had reluctantly given Quinn’s team a copy of the hard drive of Malpass’s computer’s, made after Pearl and an NYPD computer whiz observed the transfer of the files to make sure it was complete.
The drive revealed no sign of E-Bliss.org. Pearl had gone over it and found some e-mail messages and addresses to follow up on, but nothing promising. The computer’s Internet history was also unrevealing. Ruth had read several newspapers online and regularly visited a few show-business sites and gossip blogs. Pearl had reported that Ruth had bought lots of shoes over the Internet. That meant nothing other than that Pearl had new sources of shoes.
Today Pearl and Fedderman were getting follow-up statements from Ruth’s neighbors, who were telling them what a fine woman Ruth was. That had been the report from two of the actors and the producer of Major Mary, the musical she’d been costuming.
Quinn got a key from the super and entered Ruth’s apartment. It was pretty much what he expected except for the scent; there was a sachet or something like one somewhere giving off a faint whiff of cinnamon. The apartment was a functionally furnished loft, with a southern exposure and shelves of art books and pottery and sculpture. There was a shiny steel framework on one wall that held clothes. At first Quinn thought they were Ruth’s and simply didn’t fit in the big oak wardrobe, but then he realized they must be part of her work.
Near a window was a wooden drafting board with a large pad of paper on it. The top sheet was curled back over the high end of the slanted board. There was no chair nearby. Ruth must have stood while she worked.
“Hello?”
Quinn was startled by the voice. He turned and saw a short woman with no waist and a lot of frizzy blond hair. She was wearing loosely cut jeans and a sleeveless white blouse. Her incredibly large blue eyes were the sort that didn’t blink much. They looked frightened.
“I’m Hettie Crane from downstairs,” she said, “a neighbor and good friend of Ruth’s. When I heard what happened to her…”
Whatever else she’d been about to say was choked off by emotion.
“I know,” Quinn told her gently. He introduced himself, showing her his shield.
Hettie only glanced at it, but wouldn’t have been able to see it well anyway from as far away as she was. She stood stiff legged where she’d stopped just inside the door, as if she might be invading Ruth’s privacy if she ventured farther into the apartment. The way her friend died had obviously shaken Hettie’s world.
“You all right, dear?”
Hettie nodded. She lifted her chin slightly and tried to smile, but her facial muscles wouldn’t cooperate.
“It always smelled so good in here,” she said. “Ruth burned scented candles.” Her eyes became moist. She swallowed.
Quinn smiled at her and decided to give her time to wrestle some more with her new reality. Her juicy blue gaze followed him as he walked over to the drafting board.
The top sheet of paper was filled with skillfully rendered sketches of what looked like military uniforms, male and female. Quinn flipped the raised sheet of paper and saw more of the same.
“These mean anything to you?” he asked Hettie, keeping his tone casual.
She reluctantly came over to stand next to him where she could see Ruth’s drawings.
“They’re costume concepts for Major Mary,” she said. “I know because I’m directing the play. It was set to open in a couple of months.” She moved closer and looked again at the sketches. “It’ll still open. We’ll use Ruth’s costuming ideas. These sketches. They’re far enough along, and she would have wanted it that way.” She looked up at Quinn. Her eyes were still teary. “It’ll be at the Marlborough Theater in the Village. It’s a musical comedy.”
“Good luck with it,” Quinn said, and meant it. “Did you know Ruth well?”
“Very well. She’s the one who recommended me for my apartment. This building rents to a lot of theater people.”
“So you had mutual friends.”
“Quite a few,” Hettie said.
“Was Ruth involved with anyone?”
“Romantically? Sexually?”
“Either one,” Quinn said, smiling.
“She broke off about four months ago with this guy she’d been seeing. Buddy Erb. He’s an actor.”
“Know where he can be found?”
“In L.A. He does the voice-over in that commercial where the frog recommends an insurance company and then drives an SUV off a cliff. You know the one?”
“Sure.”
“Buddy does a great frog.”
“Got that kinda voice,” Quinn said. “They fight or anything when they broke up?”
“No, they just got tired of each other. It was pretty much over when Buddy got the job offer.”
“The frog?”
“Yeah. Which meant he had to move to the West Coast.”
“Yuck,” Quinn said. “All that sun and surf.”
Hettie gave him a look. She knew what he was doing, loosening her up, getting her to talk so maybe she’d yield a nugget of information. It was okay with her. She wanted the big, homely-handsome cop to catch the animal who had killed her friend.
The guy has an interesting face, Hettie thought. Rugged and memorable. And so, so trustworthy. He should have been an actor. Leading man. Not that he wasn’t way too old for her…
Not that he wasn’t an actor, in his own way.
“I know Buddy pretty well,” she said. “He’s an actor, not a killer. And from what I hear, his sexual needs are standard issue. If you check, I’m sure you’ll find he was on the other side of the continent when Ruth was killed.”
“We’ll check. You know how we are.” Quinn ran his fingertips over the sketch pad, as if trying to gain some knowledge about the sketches’ creator. “Ruth date a lot?” he asked.
“Some. She liked men, but she was busy much of the time. Especially lately, what with Major Mary.”
“You recall her mentioning anyone?”
“Since Buddy? No.”
“Since Buddy, did she ever use a dating service?”
“I doubt it. Ruth was great to look at. Men liked her. If she wanted to go out, there was always somebody there.”
“I don’t want to sound like a TV cop—”
“You’d make a great TV cop.”
“But did Ruth have any enemies whom you
know of?”
“Everybody loved Ruth.” Hettie gave him a sad grin. “More TV dialogue, but it happens to be true. She was a terrific and talented person. Even the sicko who killed her must have loved her in his own twisted way.”
“How so?”
“He chose her, didn’t he?”
50
Hettie had left, and Quinn was standing in the center of Ruth Malpass’s apartment, slowly looking around, when Pearl came in.
“Anything from the neighbors?” he asked.
“Nothing useful. They all liked Ruth. She’d been seen coming and going with a man now and then. Nobody steady. Nobody lately. She was friendly—I heard the word sweet a lot—but pretty much kept to herself.” Pearl glanced around the apartment. “Anything here?”
“Nothing unusual or helpful. Just like on her computer.”
“Nobbler had it first. You think we saw everything that was on it?”
“You watched the file transfer. The tech whiz seem okay?”
“Yeah. Seemed.”
“Then we probably got it all,” Quinn said. “Nobbler’d be taking a hell of a risk tampering with that kind of evidence. And it’d take somebody who really knew computers to be sure whatever was deleted was really and truly gone from the disk for good. You know how it works.”
“Yeah. E-mail is forever.”
They both turned when they heard the door open.
Fedderman. He looked tired, and his brown suit was even more wrinkled than usual. He’d canvassed the top floors, while Pearl had worked the ones below. He didn’t look happy.
“Any luck?” Quinn asked.
Fedderman shook his head.
“Probably not except maybe for the woman living right in the next unit, a loft apartment just like this one. Name’s Emma McKenna. Real nice. Pretty enough to be an actress.”
“She probably is an actress,” Quinn said. “What did you learn from her.”
“She was a good friend of Ruth’s. According to her, they kind of looked out for one another. She said Ruth phoned her on what must have been the day she died and left a message on her machine. Said it probably wouldn’t happen, but if a guy named Vlad came around looking for her, tell him he just missed her and get his phone number.” Fedderman shrugged. “Emma didn’t know anyone named Vlad and said Ruth never mentioned a Vlad before the phone message. So it probably means nothing.”
Pearl said, “Holy Christ!”
Fedderman looked at her in surprise. “Huh?”
Quinn and Pearl both stared at him.
“What?” Fedderman asked.
Quinn said, “Don’t you watch The History Channel?”
After explaining to Fedderman about Vlad the Impaler, they set to work doing a search of the names Vlad and Vladimir, using phone directories at first, then moving on to their computers.
In the five boroughs of New York City, there were a surprising number of Vlads and Vladimirs. The Vlads who showed up in the various criminal databases were for one reason or another unlikely suspects. One, who’d at first seemed a possibility, was in the Russian Mafia and had been killed last year in New Jersey.
Almost certainly the killer—if Vlad was the killer—wouldn’t have used his real name. Still it was something that should be checked. Every ten years or so, something like this paid off. The drudge work of detection. Renz assigned a young cop named Nevins, fresh out of the academy, to do more extensive checking. He seemed enthusiastic.
Pearl stayed behind and helped Nevins, out of pity, while Quinn and Fedderman left the office to look over the vacant apartment Pearl had seen the new Madeline leaving.
Just in case she hadn’t found what she might have gone there to retrieve.
“Happy hunting,” Nevins said, as they went out the door.
Pearl rolled her eyes.
51
A white van with the peel-off magnetic sign of a painting company was parked in front of the building the new Madeline had lived in. Peel-off signs. Sometimes Quinn thought they’d been invented especially for the convenience of criminals.
Quinn and Fedderman decided not to bother with the super. They entered the building, pushed the elevator’s “up” button, and didn’t see a soul on their ascent to Madeline’s floor.
They’d guessed right. The door down the hall that was propped open was to the new Madeline’s unit. Quinn went in first. A rug-sized canvas drop cloth covered most of the living room floor. A guy in paint-splattered white coveralls was perched on the next-to-top step of an aluminum stepladder, using a brush to apply paint where ceiling and wall met. There was a pleasant but nose-tingling smell emanating from whatever kind of paint he was using. The new color was peach. Quinn would have preferred the previous white.
“Help you?” a woman’s voice asked.
A young woman wearing white coveralls and a painter’s cap stuck on top of a lot of carrot-colored hair came in from the kitchen. She was carrying a plastic bucket of spackling compound and a small trowel that looked as if it’d had a lot of use.
Quinn and Fedderman showed both painters their shields. They seemed satisfied. The one on the ladder set back to work. The woman was probably the boss.
“We want to take another look around the apartment,” Quinn said.
“For clues?” Carrot top couldn’t say it without smiling.
“Before you paint over them,” Fedderman said.
She raised red eyebrows. “Was a crime committed here?”
“We don’t know for sure where the murder took place,” Quinn said. “That’s what the clues would be about.” There was no point in telling her the crime didn’t occur in the apartment. Let her be impressed.
She didn’t seem impressed.
“Did somebody say murder?” the painter on the ladder asked. Apparently he wasn’t up on the news.
“We’re from Homicide,” Fedderman said. “Murder it is.”
“Oh, great!” the man said. “I hope we didn’t paint over any fingerprints.”
“Not to worry,” Quinn told him. “That part of the investigation’s already been done.”
“By the crime scene unit?”
“You must watch TV,” Fedderman said.
“Law & Order,” the man said.
“We’re for that,” Quinn said.
“Well, you’re in luck,” the woman said. “We just got started. This is the only room we’ve worked in. That shouldn’t matter much, should it? I mean, aren’t most murders committed in the bedroom or kitchen? Nobody ever gets killed in the living room.”
“Depends on what’s on TV,” Fedderman said.
“Football,” the woman said. “Football on TV brings out the violence in men.”
“Oprah, too, sometimes,” Fedderman said.
The woman laughed. “You gotta be jesting. Everybody likes Oprah. Like with Raymond.”
“You must sniff a lotta paint fumes,” Fedderman said.
“We’ll take a look around,” Quinn said. “Thanks.” He thought the redheaded woman might be about to get genuinely angry at Fedderman. He’d seen it before with Oprah.
The apartment was small, so there wasn’t much to look at, especially considering they’d been there before. Quinn took the bathroom, while Fedderman began in the bedroom.
The medicine chest had been cleaned out, as had the small closet built into the wall, where towels and other bathroom supplies had been stored. Even the old tub looked as if it had been cleaned. The plastic plates were removed from the switches and sockets. The painters had been there, preparing. A clear plastic shower curtain lay neatly folded beneath the washbasin. Quinn used it to pad his knee as he knelt down and craned his neck so he could look at the underside of the porcelain basin.
Nothing there but plumbing.
He took a last look around, then went into the bedroom to join Fedderman.
It had been cleaned out, like the bathroom. Whatever the new Madeline had left behind had been either sold, stolen, or hauled away. The bed had been stripped down to the ma
ttress and box springs.
“Look under the bed, Feds?”
“I always peek under the bed,” Fedderman said. “Even at home.”
Fedderman walked over to the closet and opened the door. It was as empty as they’d seen it last time. The two or three tangled wire hangers seemed to be dangling in the same pattern as before, like a wire mobile. Cops remembered things like that. Patterns.
Fedderman started to close the closet door.
“Wait a minute,” Quinn said, staring into the empty closet.
The painted, thin piece of plywood on the closet’s back wall, maybe eighteen inches square, that allowed access to the bathroom plumbing behind the tub didn’t look quite the same. Something…
“Was that access panel slightly crooked like that?” Quinn asked.
Fedderman stared at it. “No.” An ancient line of paint was even visible halfway along one edge. “Somebody’s been in there and didn’t put the panel back quite straight. Maybe because they were in a hurry.”
“Or maybe we got us a careless plumber,” Quinn said.
He bent down, listening to the cartilage in his knees crackle. There was a fine dusting of white powder on the closet’s bare wood floor near the access panel. Some of the powder had gone down into the cracks between the boards.
Fedderman leaned close and looked over Quinn’s shoulder.
“Wanna bet what that is?” he said. Plumbing access panels were a common place for drug addicts to conceal their stash. They didn’t seem to know that’s where narcs looked immediately after examining the inside of the toilet tank.
Quinn traced his fingertip through the film of powder, then touched his finger to his tongue, ran it across his gums beneath his lower front teeth.
“Coke,” he said. “High quality.”
Fedderman straightened up. “So the new Madeline is a user. She must have left her stash when she moved out, then came back for it.”
“Maybe because she had help moving,” Quinn said.