by John Lutz
Vitali and Mishner were reasonably friendly toward Quinn and his team, but Quinn could tell they didn’t like the single-killer theory any more than…well, anyone liked it, other than Renz. And Renz liked it because it was politically expedient.
Still, Quinn had to admit it was possible that one serial killer in the city had, for whatever reason, committed two series of murders in different ways in order to forge, or satisfy, two separate identities.
Strategically silhouetted at his desk, Renz held up a folder. “This is more info on the Twenty-five-Caliber Killer’s latest victim, Floyd Becker. He was wealthy from his construction company, Becker Synergies.”
“Never heard of it,” Quinn said.
“They aren’t big in New York,” the silhouette said. “They apparently built a lot of dams and such in South America. Anyway, he was well off, if not a Rockefeller.”
“Liked to hunt, I’ll bet,” Quinn said.
“You got that right.” If the silhouette was irritated by Quinn’s remark, it didn’t show it. “We still need to find out why he checked in at the Antonian under a phony name, and why he went out without carrying any identification.” The silhouette laid the file on the desk and made a show of idly leafing through it. “No surprise to any of us that death was caused by a single twenty-five-caliber slug fired by the same make firearm—one we can’t yet identify—but definitely not by the same gun.”
“Maybe some make of target pistol with a changeable barrel,” Vitali suggested.
“No,” the silhouette said, “we checked that out. The firing pin strikes are slightly different. And you and Mishkin need to be focusing more on the Vera Doaks and Hettie Davis murders.”
“If it’s the same killer—”
“Call it a logical division of labor,” said the silhouette. “Back to the facts: Becker was shot inside the hotel, in a corridor running the length of the building and with a door leading to the passageway outside. A spot of blood on the carpet tested out to be his. For some reason, after shooting Becker, the killer then dragged the body outside into the passageway and dumped it behind a pile of trash bags. The crime scene inside the hotel offered up little evidence other than the blood. The CSU team searched and vacuumed the surrounding carpet, came up with dirt and three human hairs. None of the hairs matches Becker’s. One or more of them might be from the head of the killer. We’ll know that when we nail the bastard.” The silhouette turned its head toward Quinn. Strongly backlighted as it was, its hair looked like a hopeless tangle of wire. “The hotel staff have anything for us?”
“No,” Quinn said. “We’ll talk to them again today.”
“Do that, and interview Becker’s wife. She’s been told about his murder, but was too shaken up to talk last night.”
Quinn nodded and pretended to write something in his notepad.
“You two,” said the silhouette to Vitali and Mishkin, “keep hard at the Slicer killings and report anything pertinent to Quinn. Have you got anything on the Vera Doaks murder?”
“She’s still dead,” Vitali said.
Here was a man, Quinn thought, without much of a future in the NYPD. But he was feeling a growing fondness for Vitali.
“If you’re contacted by any of the media,” said the silhouette, unfazed by sarcasm, “don’t talk to them. I mean that. Tell them zilch.”
“Even Cindy Sellers?” Fedderman asked.
The silhouette stared at him for a moment, trying to decide if this was more sarcasm. “Especially Sellers. I’ll be the one to decide what she does or doesn’t know, and when she knows it.”
“Or doesn’t,” Quinn heard Pearl say beneath her breath. He hoped this meeting would end before she decided to jump in with Vitali and Fedderman and gang up on Renz. She could be captive to pack mentality.
The silhouette stood up and walked out from behind the desk, passing into the light and becoming Renz. “That’s it for now,” he said. “I’ve gotta meet soon with one of the mayor’s aides. Keep the information flowing to me and to each other.”
The five detectives assured Renz that they would and he politely, but hurriedly, ushered them from his office.
Outside the building, in the glare of the already hot morning, Vitali put on a pair of fashionably tiny sunglasses and said, “Have you ever heard such bullshit?”
“Oh, sure,” Quinn said. “But call me if you do have something on our murderous multitasker.”
“I’ll let you know if we apprehend either of his personalities,” Vitali said.
He and Mishkin got into their unmarked, which was a later model than Quinn and his team had arrived in, and drove away. Mishkin smiled and gave them a slight wave through the passenger-side window.
“Vitali is obviously the wiseass of the two,” Pearl said.
“I know Mishkin,” Fedderman said. “He’s almost mute and might faint at the sight of blood, but don’t sell him short, even in a down market.”
Pearl said, “Is the trail leading us to Wall Street?”
“Drive me back to the office and my car,” Quinn said, “then Feds can take the unmarked and interview the hotel employees again. You and I, Pearl, will talk to Becker’s widow.”
Nerves were frayed, after the meeting with Renz. It was best to split these two up.
Quinn and Pearl’s conversation with Floyd Becker’s widow, a hefty, brunette with a bright pink face, yielded little of value other than to confirm that Becker was, like earlier .25-Caliber Killer victims, an avid hunter.
“He even has a lion,” the widow had said. “Or what’s left of one. It’s down in basement storage someplace. For years we used it as a rug, complete with the head.”
Pearl thought about that as she and Quinn drove through noontime Manhattan traffic toward the Antonian Hotel to join forces with Fedderman. She didn’t know people still used animal skins for rugs. Wouldn’t that prompt some kind of social outrage? It should, Pearl thought. In fact she felt quite vehement about it. She glanced down at her leather shoes, felt slightly foolish, then promptly righted herself and maintained her indignation. People needed shoes, damn it! They didn’t need rugs. Especially rugs with heads on them.
“Wanna stop for some lunch?” Quinn asked.
“No. Not hungry.”
Quinn glanced over at her as he drove. “You okay, Pearl?”
“Why shouldn’t I be?” she snapped.
“I dunno. You look…angry.”
“What I’d like to do,” she said “is catch this asshole we’re after and have him made into a rug, head and all.”
“We’re pretty much of the same mind on that,” Quinn told her.
“What’s a lion but a big cat?”
“It’s a big cat,” Quinn said, making a right on Broadway.
He drove silently for a while, thinking, with Pearl fuming beside him.
She was a puzzle he’d never solve. Was that why he couldn’t shake her from his dreams?
39
Later that day, Terri and Richard were eating lunch at Kazinski’s on the Upper West Side. Terri was picking daintily at a romaine and walnut salad while Richard wolfed down his goulash.
She hadn’t mentioned the hook in the bathroom ceiling. Hadn’t thought it worth mentioning. When she saw the super she’d ask what it was for. Maybe to hang a bicycle by one of its wheels, get it out of the way for when guests came over. Not a bad idea for a tiny Manhattan apartment. Close the shower curtain and no one would ever guess they were sharing a bathroom with a Schwinn.
“I love to order goulash,” Richard Crane said. “You never know what you’re going to get.”
Terri grinned and took a sip of her Chianti. “You obviously approve of that version.”
“Yes. It’s delicious. But maybe that’s because I’m with you.”
How can he always know exactly the right thing to say?
Terri had called Office Tech that morning and told them she wasn’t feeling well. She was out of sick days, so the store manager allowed her to use one of her vacation
days and said he hoped she’d feel better.
She’d felt like telling him she’d never felt better in her life, but instead politely closed the lid of her cell phone and continued her walk through the park with Richard Crane.
They’d played all morning, enjoying each other like lovers who’d been separated by life and somehow found each other. Maybe that’s what they were, Terri thought. Maybe Richard was right in saying some things were predestined. Wasn’t the study of genetics making that more and more obvious?
Human beings were so mysterious, Terri thought. So unpredictable. Didn’t that make life wonderful?
Lavern winced as her friend Bess touched a damp washrag to the cut near her left eye. Bess held the washrag out and glanced at the blood, shook her head.
“This is happening more often,” she said. There was anger in her voice.
Lavern could only nod. One of Hobbs’s glancing blows had caught her in her throat, and it was still sore.
“You gotta do something,” Bess said. “Make some kinda move.”
Lavern began to cry. Bess touched the cool washrag to her injured eye again, and both women sat motionless for a while.
“Men,” Bess said, finally. “They’re never what we expect.”
“Neither are we what they expect,” Lavern said hoarsely.
“So everything’s our fault?”
“Only most of the time,” Lavern said.
Bess looked at her. “So you’re goin’ back to that piece of shit again?”
“Yeah. And I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t call him that.”
“Ah, Lavern…”
“Really,” Lavern said, and coughed, choking.
Now Bess began to cry.
Richard forked in some more goulash. “Would you like more bread?” he asked, while pouring her more wine.
She looked up from the topped-off wineglass and smiled. “Are you trying to get me drunk so you can take me home and have wild sex with me?”
“More like relaxed sex.”
“No,” she said.
He frowned.
“On the bread, I mean.”
He grinned and somehow managed to add even more wine to her glass.
After lunch Terri went to the ladies’ room and was surprised when she returned to find Richard holding a brown paper sack. He’d gone to the bar section of Kazinski’s and bought a bottle of wine.
“Chardonnay this time,” he said. “A particularly good vintage.”
“Are you a wine expert?” Terri asked, as they left the restaurant and began walking through the warm afternoon toward a subway stop where a train would carry them south.
“Like everybody else,” Richard said. He was joking, but Terri got the idea that he did know about wine. She suspected that Richard knew quite a lot about a number of things but was too polite to parade his knowledge.
“Every now and then,” she said, “your good breeding shows.”
“You object?”
“No. I like it. To most of the single men in Manhattan ‘good breeding’ signifies something else altogether.”
He laughed. “Well, I like to think I know something about that, too.”
“You should write a book,” she said.
“I’d title it Terri.”
Once inside her apartment, they drank to that.
“Around the time of the shooting,” Fedderman said to Rosa Pajaro, “you loaded a cart with some clean laundry in the basement and brought it up in an elevator to lobby level.”
“Sí. Yes. There is a storage room on this level where extra linens and other supplies are kept.”
“It’s near where Mr. Becker was shot.”
He stared at her expectantly, even though he hadn’t actually asked a question.
She returned his gaze for only a few seconds and then dropped her eyes to stare at the maroon carpet of the Antonian Hotel lobby. They were sitting and talking in what the management called a conversation nook. The maid was a terribly unskilled liar. Fedderman found himself liking her, and thought she must have been extremely attractive a few years and pounds ago. Rosa Pajaro was a woman who showed hard wear.
“Is right,” she said, finally.
“When you rolled your cart toward the storage room, did you notice anyone or anything suspicious in the corridor?”
She shook her head no. “Solitario. I was alone with my job.”
He had the impression she might speak English better than she was letting on. But that was a common ploy for illegal aliens, which Rosa Pajaro might very well be. In order to get her job here at the Antonian, she had to have papers, but papers could be forged.
“According to your records,” Fedderman said, “you’ve been working here at the hotel for six years.”
“Yes, that is so. I work hard.”
“So it says here.” The papers Fedderman consulted mentioned nothing of the sort, being a computer printout of directions and a restaurant menu. “You’re rated as an excellent employee. One who would tell the truth.”
“I am saying what is true. There is nothing to tell.” Again she couldn’t meet his eyes. “When this terrible thing happened, I must have been in the storage room.”
“Or it might have happened before you arrived.”
“Si. Or even after I left.”
“Did you notice any blood on the carpet near the door to outside?”
“No. Nothing.”
“You’re saying there was no blood?”
“I say only that I didn’t notice any.”
“Was the door to outside closed all the way and locked?”
“I couldn’t say. I didn’t pay attention to the door, only to my work.”
Fedderman stared at her. He knew she was lying, but probably not about anything pertinent. Maybe she’d seen Becker’s body before it was moved and then hightailed away. Or maybe she had seen the bloodstain, though on the maroon carpet it wouldn’t have been very noticeable. He could take Rosa Pajaro in and lean on her, make her afraid, even suggest she was a suspect. But she couldn’t be held, and when she got the opportunity she might run. If she was an illegal, so what? Fedderman didn’t want to make trouble for her. There was really no reason to push her, he thought, unless she might be the killer, which was too unlikely to consider.
“I am in trouble?” she asked, alarmed by his thoughtful silence.
Fedderman smiled at her. “Not as long as you’ve told the truth.”
“That’s what I’ve done, I swear.” She crossed herself. Fedderman wasn’t sure, but he thought she might have done it backward.
40
Wow. Something’s not right.
She knew she was beginning to slouch on the sofa, but she couldn’t seem to make herself sit up straight.
The food, the wine, the walk from the subway stop to her apartment had made Terri Gaddis exhausted. After the third glass of wine, her eyes began involuntarily closing. It felt as if invisible fingers were pushing them shut.
She didn’t want to feel this way. Richard expected some of that wild sex she’d mentioned at lunch. She’d almost promised him. He’d certainly be willing, but the wine was having its effect and she was fast losing her desire.
What’s wrong with me? Why do I feel so…
Struggling not to fall asleep, she heard him rise from beside her on the sofa and cross the room, go into the kitchen.
When he returned, he lifted her head and gently placed the rim of a glass against her lips.
“Drink this, sweetheart. It’ll fix you up.”
His voice sounded far, far away. She sipped and was mildly surprised. She tasted the same wine she’d been drinking, one of the reasons she felt so tired.
“S’more chardonnay,” she muttered.
“You say you want more?” he asked, amused.
He’s deliberately misunderstanding.
“Same…” she murmured. She tried to say the word chardonnay again, but it was too difficult. Her tongue was getting numb, and there was no feeling in her chee
ks. If she tried to touch them, they might not be there. They might be made of wood. She tried again. “Chardonnay.” She heard something slurred and incomprehensible and realized it was her own voice.
Richard answered, she was sure, but she couldn’t understand him as she dropped into a comforting warm darkness.
As she was keying the dead bolt on the door, Pearl heard the phone ringing inside her apartment. Which of course made her hurry and fumble and drop the key on the hall carpet.
By the time she’d opened the door and reached the phone, it had rung at least nine times. Maybe something important.
Too exhausted to be cautious and check caller ID, she took several long steps across the living room and scooped up the receiver.
“Pearl? Is that you, dear?”
Her mother, calling from Sunset Assisted Living in New Jersey. Pearl’s heart took a dive.
“Pearl?”
“Me.”
“It’s your mother, Pearl, calling from Hades.”
Pearl tried at least to keep a civil tone in her voice. “Assisted living isn’t Hades, Mom.”
“So purgatory then. A stop on the way down, just to torture. I’ve been calling and calling, and not even your machine answers anymore.”
Pearl saw that the LED display on her answering machine was signaling that there was no more room for messages. It also indicated that she’d received fifteen messages. She stretched the phone cord so she could sit on the end of the sofa.
“Is something wrong, Mom?”
“I thought you’d never ask. Yes, wrong. I’m concerned, as a good mother should be, about my daughter, which is only natural and is why I’m calling, to find out some pertinent information about it.”
Pearl didn’t like this at all. She was worn down by the gauntlet of conversations she’d run all day with people who couldn’t remember, didn’t recall, didn’t care, might be lying anyway. “What would it be, Mom?”
“The thing just behind your ear, dear. That’s what it is, and it’s more important than you, in your hectic and solitary life, seem to think.”