by John Lutz
Just the kind of talk Stone wanted to hear. “It’s a business decision, Victor, pure and simple. It best serves our select client, and it best serves the company. Think of it that way, and it’s our only reasonable option. It’s important, of course, that Jill Clark never be found.”
“There’s a place in New Jersey.”
“I don’t want to know about it. That’s your department, and I trust you can manage it as well as you always have.”
Stone deliberately hadn’t mentioned Gloria again. Victor would be acting on his own.
“When do you want it done?” Victor asked.
“Soon,” Stone said.
“How?”
“That’s totally up to you.”
Victor smiled.
69
The old man behind the desk at the Tumble Onn Inn watched the Louisiana state patrol car pull into the lot with its lights out. That made four cars.
“What’re you waiting for?” he asked one of the troopers in the motel office.
There were two troopers in the office, making it feel half as big as it was. It seemed the only space to move around a little was behind the desk. That was where the old man, whose name was Ike, sat on a high stool that had a low but rigid bentwood back. He hauled his scrawny body up onto the stool now and then to ease his perpetually aching spine. It was better than standing and trying to make nice with the guests. Or with the cops. Ike had suffered in his life at the hands of the police and was wary of them.
Neither of the troopers bothered answering Ike. They were polite enough when they chose to speak. It was just that they didn’t seem to think of him as someone worth answering.
Ike had misplaced his glasses, which made the two troopers look almost exactly alike. Burly six-footers with dark, flat-topped military haircuts and aggressive chins. One of the troopers had on some kind of cologne or aftershave that made Ike feel like sneezing.
Ike persisted. “She’s just one woman alone, an’ she probably ain’t the one you’re lookin’ for anyways.”
“You called us,” one of the troopers reminded Ike.
“Well, I figured she wasn’t right somehow, the way she flew off the handle when I told her no.”
The other trooper smiled.
“Imagine a woman like that,” Ike said, “offerin’ to sell sex to an old guy like me. Hell, testosterwhatever’s just a memory to me. These days, the only part of me that ain’t stiff—”
“Don’t tell us,” the trooper who’d smiled said.
“You might not believe it to look at me, but I’m eighty-six years old. And she just up an’ bold as you please said she didn’t have the money to pay for her room these past two days, an’ would I take a—”
“We don’t need to know that part,” the same trooper said. “We only need to know if it’s the woman we’re looking for. The description you gave on the phone makes us suspect she is.”
“Lookin’ for her for what?” Ike asked, raising his thick gray eyebrows, making his cadaverous face seem even thinner. “You two guys want a—”
“Hey!” the other trooper said, raising a cautioning forefinger.
“I don’t understand you guys,” Ike said. “Hell, I just thought a patrol car’d swing by here and you’d take her in for vagrancy or tryin’ to peddle her ass. Who is she, Bonnie Parker?” He fixed his bleary eyes on them. “You two even know who Bonnie Parker was?”
“Owned a diner outside Slidell, if memory serves,” the trooper on the right said. “Big redheaded woman, loud voice.”
“Different Bonnie Parker,” Ike said, eyeing the trooper with contempt. “I guess you ain’t heard of Bonnie and Clyde.”
“We know a lot of Clydes,” the other trooper said.
“John Dillinger?”
“He had something to do with Enron, right?”
“Christ on a stick! You call yourselves law enforcement officers?”
The troopers were both grinning. Ike, knowing he’d been had, glared at them and shifted position on his stool. “They stayed here once, the real Bonnie and Clyde. Room number eighteen.”
Both troopers were staring dead eyed at him, not buying it.
One of them turned at the soft sound of gravel crunching out in the driveway. Another car arriving. This one had its lights off, too, but Ike could see it out the window and it wasn’t a state police car. It was a sheriff’s department car from nearby Pool County.
“That’s him,” one of the troopers said.
“Who?” Ike asked.
He didn’t think they were going to answer him. Then the nearest trooper said, “The only one of us here other’n you who’s seen Mary Smith.”
“An’ she offered me a—”
“Forget that part of it,” said the trooper farthest away.
The other trooper winked. “Excuse my partner. He’s kind of a prude. And we don’t think the woman really is Mary Smith.”
“Don’t make me no never mind,” Ike said. “That’s the name she signed in under. Said her husband’d be here the end of the week with some money, an’ she’d pay me cash when she checked out.”
“That before or after you got that offer of sex?”
“After. She went to cryin’ when I turned her down. Then she gave me the husband story.”
“And you believed her, even though she signed in as Mary Smith?”
“I pretended to. She’s a sweetie. An’ she seemed all frazzled an’ I felt sorry for her. Thought she might have some kinda mental or drug problem an’ she should be in the hands of the authorities. Anyways, I seen more Smiths sign in here than you can imagine.”
“I can imagine a lot of Smiths,” said the trooper farthest from the desk.
“Let’s go,” said his partner. To Ike: “Just sit tight here, old fella, and we’ll finish our business and you can go back to that girlie magazine you’ve been reading.”
Ike started. He’d thought he’d concealed Bizarre Desires under People on the table behind the desk. Now he saw that People had been knocked sideways and Bizarre Desires was plainly visible. He must have brushed up against the table.
“Hell, I got no idea where that came from. I used to read Playboy years ago.”
But the troopers were gone. It was amazing how quickly and quietly they’d moved, for such big men. They hadn’t let the screen door slam behind them. Ike hadn’t even heard the stretched-out spring squeal the way it usually did when the door opened and closed. They were here; they were gone.
Ike went back to his magazine, but he couldn’t read it or even focus on the photographs.
Too much going on outside.
70
Outside, the two troopers walked to a line of trees at the edge of the parking lot opposite the room where Mary Smith presumably lay sleeping. The room’s lights were out, anyway.
A knot of their fellow troopers was already there, along with Lieutenant Floyd Balamore from headquarters up the highway. A young, tan-uniformed guy who must be Simmons, the Pool County sheriff’s deputy, was standing beside the lieutenant.
Simmons shifted his weight and the moonlight touched his face, and all of a sudden he didn’t look so young.
“We’ve got the back covered in case there’s some way out we don’t know about,” Lieutenant Balamore said to Simmons. Balamore was African American, big, smart, and very ambitious. He had sparkling dark eyes and wore a tiny brush mustache that was always impeccably trimmed and made him look as if he’d just sucked a lemon and, hey, it’d tasted okay.
“We’re gonna advance in a semicircle,” Balamore said, “with weapons drawn, and two men are gonna knock on the door and identify themselves as police. One of them’s gonna be looking back at you, Deputy Simmons. When you’re positive this is the Aiken woman, you give us the nod.”
Simmons, who’d seen and talked with Cathy Lee Aiken back at the swamp shack and was 90 percent sure she was also “Mary Smith,” nodded.
“Like that,” Lieutenant Balamore said, “but not yet.” His smile was thin beneath the twitchy li
ttle mustache. A comedian too dry for those under his command, he felt unappreciated. Simmons, he figured, was as humorless as the rest of them.
Balamore turned to his somber troopers. “Let’s do this thing. And remember, the subject might be armed and dangerous.”
They spread out, just as he’d instructed, and slowly advanced across the dark parking lot toward the end room that presumably contained the woman registered as Mary Smith, and whose description matched that of the woman they sought, Cathy Lee Aiken. Armed and dangerous as a woman named Cathy Lee could be.
The two troopers at the motel room door stood well on either side of it, concerned that a fusillade of bullets might smash through it at any second. The one on the left leaned in, knocked three times, and loudly proclaimed he was police. The one on the left had his gun raised and held with both hands. His head was turned and he was looking at Simmons, who was off to the side of the door and about twenty feet away.
Having met Cathy Lee, Simmons didn’t think all these precautions were necessary, but he had his gun out so as not to be the only one not ready to blast away. There was enough firepower here to take on an armed battalion. Nobody even knew if Cathy Lee Aiken—assuming the woman in the motel room was Cathy Lee Aiken—actually had a gun.
The motel room door slowly opened, and the form of a woman in a white robe appeared. At first she stood motionless. Then she moved forward, leaning out into the moonlight, and Simmons saw her face as well as her cleavage.
She was Cathy Lee, all right. He nodded in an exaggerated way, so there would be no mistake.
No sooner had he done that then Cathy Lee suddenly bolted straight out the door and past the two nearest troopers. She stopped ten feet beyond them and pulled a large revolver from beneath her robe, causing the robe to flap open and reveal her otherwise naked body. She began turning in a tight circle, taking in the entire scene with wide eyes while affording everyone an entire view of what was beneath the robe.
There was no contingency plan for this. The startled troopers who’d been at the door froze when they saw her. The troopers lined in the lot couldn’t fire for fear of hitting their comrades behind Cathy Lee. The troopers behind her couldn’t fire without risking hitting one of those standing out in the lot. And of course there was the fact that in every demonstrable way she was a woman, and that gave men with guns pause.
Cathy Lee raised the revolver with both hands and began squeezing the trigger. The big revolver roared again and again. One bullet slammed into a car parked fifty feet to her left. Three went twenty feet up and lodged in some tree limbs. One went away into the night over a bean field. The last struck the side of a tractor trailer driving past on the state highway, hauling tires north to Atlanta. The driver wasn’t even aware the trailer had taken a bullet, one that was now probably bouncing around inside a tire.
Cathy Lee pulled the empty gun’s trigger several more times, then sat down on the ground and began to cry.
71
Palmer Stone had showered and was shaving, preparing to leave for the office, when he noticed the news was on the small-screen TV in his bathroom. A beautiful and sincere blond anchorwoman was talking about a woman who’d been arrested in Louisiana, and was thought to be the confederate of the two men who’d been charged with murdering Tom Coulter and with possession and distribution of methamphetamine.
Because of Coulter’s fortunate death and the assumption that he’d been the Torso Murderer, Stone had been following the news reports on him with some interest. He’d read about the woman who’d been with the two men charged with murdering Coulter, and knew something about her. A woman like that knew how to take care of herself. Stone thought she’d gotten away clean. Well, not clean, but away.
Obviously, she hadn’t.
The mug shot of a distraught-looking woman with scraggly brown hair was shown on the tiny flat-panel screen. She had dark and desperate eyes, attractive features, and was staring at the screen with her lips parted as if she were about to speak. Stone thought there was something about her reminiscent of trailer parks, cheap beauty shops, and tattoos in unmentionable places.
“Twenty-year-old Cathy Lee Aiken resisted arrest,” the anchorwoman was saying, “and after a fierce gun battle with police, in which, thankfully, no one was killed or injured, she was taken kicking and screaming into custody. Police regard her as a valuable source of information about the recent whereabouts of fugitive Tom Coulter, the alleged Torso Murderer, and what led to the murder of Coulter himself by suspects Joe Ray Jeffers and Juan Adamson, allegedly. It’s reported that Aiken had been living with the two alleged killers in what some people are said to be describing as a ménage à trois.” She lowered her gaze and flipped a page that had been invisible until she lifted it to camera level, then looked back up and smiled. “They say dogs can’t talk, but in Spangler, Idaho—”
Stone used the remote to switch off the TV and stood holding the remote for a while, still aimed like a gun at the blank screen.
The Aiken woman might know something about Coulter that would preclude him from being the Torso Murderer. Maybe she and Coulter were lovers, and he’d been with her in some sleazy motel, or wherever she might live, at the times of some E-Bliss.org clients’ deaths and virtual rebirths. The torsos that so confounded the police couldn’t be attributed to him.
Stone laid down the remote, which had a dab of shaving cream on it, and resumed leveling his sideburns. He was uneasy about the arrest of the woman in Louisiana. The threat wasn’t yet clearly defined, but it was there, all right. She looked terrified in her mug shot. She looked like the sort who might scare, who might talk and talk.
On the other hand, Cathy Lee Aiken’s credibility wasn’t the best. She was a prostitute—or at least a woman of questionable morality—and an accessory to murder. Not to mention her probable involvement in an illegal methamphetamine operation. Why should anything she say be taken as gospel?
The law demanded facts, not the frantic babbling of a woman in custody and charged with committing serious crimes herself.
But the image of Cathy Lee Aiken was still in his mind.
Cheap whore! No one will believe you. You’ll lump the truth in with your lies, and after a while no one will listen.
Still, when she talked, it would mean the police would double their efforts to solve the Torso Murders, an investigation that might lead to the company—his company—that he’d raised from an idea into a profit machine not even yet running at full speed and power. Stone felt the added pressure like a wedge of lead in his gut.
He nicked himself and winced in the mirror. He was shaving sloppily. As Victor had been shaving recently.
Stress could do that to a person.
Quinn and Renz were in Renz’s office at One Police Plaza. It was too warm in the office. These days it almost always was. Quinn was beginning to think Renz liked it that way. Renz was taking medication for his blood pressure. Maybe that had something to do with it. And there was a stronger than usual smell of cigar smoke. Renz’s secret vice. Something he and Quinn had in common.
“This woman the Louisiana cops have in custody,” Renz said. “They say she’s talking up a storm. Nailing those yokels who killed Coulter to the cross.”
“Was she in on it?” Quinn asked.
“Looks that way. That’s why she’s running off at the mouth. I talked by phone to a state police lieutenant down there a couple of hours ago. He says they can’t shut her up.”
“They get that way sometimes when they’re both scared and guilty,” Quinn said.
“That one’s both. And she opened fire with a revolver on a bunch of state police. That’s enough to put her behind walls where they don’t make cupcakes. I say let her blab. I love a motormouth suspect.”
“She say Coulter was murdered for that stolen truck he was driving?”
“No,” Renz said. “He actually wanted to leave them the newer truck and take their old rust bucket because it wouldn’t draw attention and it’d be harder to trace. A
nd of course the yokels wouldn’t report it as stolen. That mighta worked, but he also demanded money. The two yokels were dealing meth. Coulter tried to hold them up. Made out like he was Jesse James or something, she said. The yokels didn’t like it. She said one of them shot Coulter, and then later they drove him to a spot near the highway and dumped his body. They kept the truck, though, had it repainted and got it a junkyard title.”
“That truck’s movements are gonna be traced back to when Coulter stole it,” Quinn said. “People will remember it and Coulter. Maybe think they remember, whether they saw them or not. Coulter will have an alibi for at least one, and probably more, of the Torso Murders.”
“Aiken woman’s already saying he spent time hanging around some roadhouse in Louisiana. It places him down there at the time of the most recent Torso killing.” Renz pressed his temples with his forefingers, as if he had a bad headache. “Media pricks aren’t gonna like it that we put them on the wrong road.”
“They had fun while it lasted,” Quinn said.
“Puts the pressure back on E-Bliss, too,” Renz said. “That could be good or bad.”
Quinn knew he was right. Once it got out that Coulter couldn’t be the Torso Murderer, E-Bliss.org had nothing to lose by resuming operations. The company would also know that the investigation into the Torso Murders would heat up again. He made a mental note to call Pearl and tell her to stick as close as possible to Jill Clark.
Renz’s phone line blinked and he picked up. Someone calling on his direct line. He swiveled his chair so his back was to Quinn. Not that Quinn couldn’t hear him. And not that it mattered, because the caller did most of the talking.
When Renz had finished the conversation and swiveled around to face Quinn again, he hung up the phone and said, “That was my new best friend, Lieutenant Balamore, in Louisiana. He tells me all three suspects are talking now, accusing each other of every crime ever committed. It’s a feast of information. Don’t they have sense enough to lawyer up?”