by John Lutz
“Feds and I have a bet,” Pearl said. “He thinks we’ll never see Chrissie Keller again. I think we will, and there’ll be an explanation for her disappearance.”
“What kind of explanation?” Quinn asked.
Pearl smiled. “Not necessarily one we’ll believe.”
“What if she can’t contact us because the Carver’s made sure it’s impossible?”
Pearl had considered that and saw it as unlikely. But there was no ruling it out. “It’s something to keep in mind,” she said, “but I do lean the other way. From the beginning, Chrissie struck me as the disappearing type. Not playing straight with us from word one.”
“Meanwhile,” Quinn said, “she’s still our client. We’re spending her money, so we’ll continue to work the case, no matter what Renz says.”
They both looked at him.
Fedderman folded his paper closed and said, “Renz?” As if a rare and unpleasant ailment had been mentioned.
Quinn told them about yesterday evening’s phone call.
When he was finished, Fedderman said, “Is that guy ever, for even one second, not a self-serving prick?”
Quinn shrugged. “He’s a politician.”
“Didn’t I just say that?”
Pearl sat staring and smiling slightly at Quinn. She didn’t have to ask whether they were going to continue on the case. Instead she said, “How are we going to work it?”
“I’m about to make a phone call,” Quinn said. “And not to Harley Renz.”
It hadn’t taken him long to dig up Cindy Sellers’s direct line at City Beat from when she’d badgered them on a previous case.
She answered on the second ring. Quinn guessed a muck-raking reporter had to stick close to the phone. Or possibly his call had been patched through to a mobile phone.
When Quinn had identified himself, Sellers’s voice became wary. “Always a pleasure to hear from you, Captain.”
“Not ‘Captain’ anymore,” Quinn said. “I’ve opened up my own investigative agency.”
“That’s right, I heard.” She waited a few beats. “Well, anything I can do to scratch somebody’s back who’s willing to scratch back…?”
“What I always liked about you was that it wasn’t necessary to do a verbal dance getting to the point. You’re honest in your own special way.”
She laughed. “But I like dancing with you, Quinn. You tromp on my toes now and then, but what the hell.”
“You like dancing with Harley Renz?”
“Oh, he’s an amazingly deft dancer. But you know that.”
There was a smile in her voice. She knew he wanted something, or he wouldn’t have called.
“To the point,” Quinn said, “I have some information that might interest you.”
“So interest me.”
“There you go—very direct.”
“You be too, why don’t you?”
Quinn almost smiled. Sometimes Sellers could be as much of a smart-ass as Pearl. “Remember the Carver murders?”
“Sure. Serial killer, five or six years ago. One of the few in this city that you didn’t catch. In fact, didn’t that killer—”
“He was never caught,” Quinn interrupted. “But it turns out that was only round one. The case has been reopened, and we think he can be caught now.”
“New evidence?”
“We can’t say.”
“What made the NYPD reopen the investigation?”
“It didn’t. We did.”
“We?”
“Quinn and Associates Investigations.”
Sellers was quiet for a moment. “And the NYPD doesn’t like you meddling.”
“That’s it.”
“Renz told you to fold your tent.”
“Uh-huh. He doesn’t want the department and its illustrious police commissioner to be embarrassed by dredging up an old case the police were unable to solve. He’s afraid of the negative publicity, so he’s pressuring us to halt our investigation.”
Cindy Sellers laughed. “No point in that if the information’s already out in the media, based on information from anonymous sources, of course.”
“That’s the game,” Quinn said.
Sellers said, “I’ll play. But there has to be a quid pro quo.”
“You’ll be first in the media to know everything,” Quinn said. “Starting now.”
“And I’ll be in on the finale? If there is one.”
“There’ll be one,” Quinn said, “and you’ll be there.”
Again one of Cindy’s silences. There weren’t many; she tended to think on the run, asking questions along the way.
“Somebody must have hired you,” she said at last.
“The killer’s last victim had a sister. A twin.”
“A twin! And the surviving twin is your client?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Wonderful! The surviving twin wants vengeance. It’s almost poetic. It’s as if the murderer killed only half of his victim, and now the other half—”
“However you want to play it,” Quinn said.
“We have an arrangement, Quinn. Tell me more.”
And he did. Not everything, of course, but just enough.
After hanging up, he absently wiped his hand on his pants leg, as if Sellers had salivated over the phone.
Fedderman was grinning at him. “Renz is gonna be so mad he might catch fire.”
“Give me a can of gas,” Pearl said, rather absently.
She was gazing at Quinn in a way he recognized, thoughtfully and slightly disturbed, as if she’d again discovered a new facet of his deviousness.
“This will work out,” he assured her.
Now there was something cautionary in her look, warning him that he’d done something possibly unwise as well as distasteful. Her “If you lie down with dogs…” look.
“I can put up with fleas,” he said.
She nodded and turned back to her computer. She’d known exactly what he’d been thinking. Incredible.
Maybe her mouse pad was a Ouija board.
“My, my, my,” Pearl said, reading over additional information about Geraldine Knott, the young woman who’d survived an attack eight years ago in Detroit by an assailant very much like the Carver.
She remained seated at her computer. Quinn and Fedderman were standing behind her, looking over her shoulder at the monitor. They were all reading the old news item from the archives of a Detroit newspaper. It was accompanied by another blurred black-and-white photo. In this one Geraldine Knott was standing and leaning sideways, as if hoping the camera’s aim would miss her, holding both hands covering her face.
This account of the attack was more detailed. It described how her masked assailant had gotten her on the ground and straddled her, kneeling on her upper arms to pin her to the parking garage’s concrete floor. He’d then shown her a knife and explained to her what he intended to do with it. As the news item quoted the tearful intended victim: “…slice off my nipples, do some creative carving on me, then carve me a big smile under my chin.” Fortunately for Geraldine Knott, her attacker had been frightened away.
“He mentioned carving twice,” Quinn noted.
“Could be early Carver,” Pearl said. “Or maybe some sicko imitating him.”
“Except this woman was attacked before anybody’d ever heard of the Carver,” Fedderman pointed out.
“Maybe this guy had heard of him and was imitating him even before he became famous,” Quinn suggested.
Pearl said, “The odds on that are about the same as Fedderman wearing both socks right side out.”
“Did I do that again?” Fedderman asked automatically, glancing down at his ankles and tugging up his pants legs.
“Sure seems like this could be our guy,” Pearl said. “The way he showed the knife and told her what he was about to do, getting his jollies by scaring the hell out of her. Or maybe our sicko saw this news account when it was fresh in a Detroit paper and it stuck in his mind.”
“I’d bet on Feds’s socks,” Quinn said.
“Then you think this was early Carver?” Pearl asked.
“I don’t know.”
Fedderman unconsciously glanced down at his feet again. “So what are we gonna do with this information?”
“Put it in the hopper,” Quinn said, “along with everything else we know or think we know.”
“And then?” Fedderman asked.
“Wait and see if someday it makes sense.”
16
Holifield, Ohio, 1992
Jerry Grantland, thirteen years old last week, lowered himself from his bedroom window onto the soft carpet of lawn. He glanced at the luminous green hands of his Timex watch. One o’clock a.m.
That was the time it usually happened.
If it was going to happen.
There were clouds, and the moon was only a sliver, like a glowing shaving from a larger carving. Jerry knew that once he made it across the dark stretch of lawn that was the shadow of the house, cast by the softly illuminated streetlight out near the curb, he’d be in almost total darkness. The rest would be easy. There was a wooden picket fence running the property line between his house and the Kellers’ side yard, but it was only four feet high. The nimble Jerry could be over it in seconds and on his way into the shadows of the overgrown honeysuckle bush.
The bush would conceal him until he made it past the rosebushes and into the yews, where he could squat unseen in the darkness outside the Keller twins’ bedroom window.
He knew where the twins, a year younger than he was, slept in their matching twin beds with their brass headboards. Tiffany’s bed was against the far wall, Chrissie’s nearer the window.
Jerry found his familiar, comfortable place to squat on his heels and peer beneath the partly drawn shade into the room.
Both girls appeared to be sleeping beneath thin white sheets that were pulled all the way up to their chins.
Jerry thought it unlikely that they were sleeping. Like him, they were probably waiting.
He watched as both girls stirred and stiffened. Tiffany sat straight up in bed and then lay down again. Both twins curled onto their sides, pretending to be asleep. The window was raised slightly to let in the night breeze, and Jerry thought he could hear the faint rustle of the sheets as the girls’ young bodies moved beneath them.
Jerry let his thoughts about the Keller twins roam free, as he often did. If the twins knew what they did—and what was done to them—in his imagination, they’d be appalled. But they wouldn’t be surprised. In some ways they were interchangeable. In others—
As he always did when it happened, Jerry drew in his breath.
The bedroom door had opened and closed silently.
The twins’ father, Mr. Keller—Ed Keller—was like a shadow in the room, but a shadow with substance.
Jerry swallowed and stayed as still as possible at the window. He’d been sure Mr. Keller would enter the twins’ room. Mr. Keller was some kind of salesman and was out of town a lot. Whatever he sold had something to do with cars, with Detroit; that’s what either twin would say when Jerry asked about their father.
Mr. Keller had been away on business most of the week, and this was his first night back. That was how Jerry knew he’d visit the twins’ room. After being out of town for a while on one his sales trips, he almost always paid the twins a visit.
The tall shadow that was Mr. Keller moved to Tiffany’s bed. Chrissie, in her own bed, turned away, drew her knees up almost to her chin, and held the wadded sheet tightly against her ears. She was facing the window, but Jerry was sure she couldn’t see him, the way her face was screwed into an ugly mask, her eyes clenched tightly shut.
Behind her, shadows began to move on the far wall. Holding his breath, Jerry leaned slightly forward.
Within minutes the rhythmic, writhing dance of light and darkness on the wall became more urgent, wilder. It was impossible to know what was shadow and what was Tiffany or her father.
He could hear a soft moaning through the window and couldn’t be sure if it was Tiffany or Chrissie.
The writhing and moaning continued in a madder and madder rhythm. Jerry was hard now, and he lowered his right hand and stroked himself. Within minutes he’d reached orgasm.
The movement of the distorted figures on the wall finally slowed, then stopped altogether.
The tall shadow that was Mr. Keller straightened up from Tiffany’s bed. It moved toward the window, but Jerry, secure in the knowledge that he was invisible in the darkness and shelter of the yews, stayed motionless and continued to watch.
Mr. Keller rested a hand briefly on Chrissie’s shoulder. He knew she’d been awake, been listening. Jerry thought that almost surely she hadn’t been the only one in the house who’d heard. The twin’s mother must have heard something of what happened over and over in the twins’ room.
She must know.
The world of adults. Jerry wasn’t sure if he’d ever understand it.
He watched as Mr. Keller crept to the bedroom door, opened it, and merged with the darkness beyond it, closing the door behind him.
Neither twin moved for a long time, and then Chrissie removed the wadded sheet from her ears and sat up in bed. She looked over at Tiffany, who lay facing away from her, pretending to be asleep.
Chrissie lay back and pretended to sleep herself.
Jerry backed away from the window and made for the dark patch in the lawn where he could cross unseen into his own yard. He would return to his bed, where he’d pretend he’d never left the house, that he was asleep like the twins.
Everyone pretending, as the night moved toward morning and another day.
17
New York, the present
“We need to get together off the record,” Harley Renz had said to Quinn over the phone. That was why Quinn was in Bryant Park, on Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue, next to the library.
Bryant was a pleasant green oasis surrounded by concrete in a busy part of town. Quinn sat on a bench not far from where a group of people were playing some kind of game where players tossed heavy balls underhanded and palm down, so reverse English would cut down the distance they rolled when they came to earth. Every once in a while about half the players would jump up and down and hug each other, but Quinn couldn’t see that much had been accomplished.
Harley had entered the park from Sixth Avenue and was trudging steadily in Quinn’s direction. His general sagginess made him appear a lot heavier than he was. Maybe because of his face, which was jowly and sad-eyed, with a fleshy mouth usually arced down at the corners. Gravity was not his friend. The expensive blue suit he had on might have helped if he’d bothered to button its coat. Now and then the breeze off the avenue whipped the coat sideways and revealed the thin leather strap of a shoulder holster.
He spotted Quinn and veered slightly to set his course more directly toward the bench, swinging his arms in his peculiar restricted way, as if he were carrying a heavy bucket in each hand.
When he was about ten feet from Quinn, he showed his bloodhound smile. Sunlight sparked off one of his canine teeth. “I thought you’d be smoking one of your Cuban cigars, Quinn.”
“Isn’t it illegal to smoke in a public park?”
“Damned if I know,” Renz said. He pulled a cellophane-wrapped cigar from his shirt pocket, unwrapped it, and stuffed the torn cellophane back into his pocket.
“Not to mention that Cuban cigars are illegal.”
“Not to mention.” Renz bit the end off the cigar and spat it off to the side, then fired up the cigar with a silver lighter. The tobacco burned unevenly and made a soft sizzling sound, the way cheap cigars often did.
“Somebody have a baby?” Quinn asked.
Renz exhaled and held the cigar off to the side, as if even he was put off by its odor. “If you’d tell me your source for the Cubans, I wouldn’t have to smoke these dog turds.” He sucked on the cigar again, rolled the smoke around in his mouth and then slowly released it. “
’Course, I don’t know now if I can still trust you.”
“You never could,” Quinn said.
“But I thought so for some things, which is why I’m disappointed in you.” Renz clamped the cigar in his teeth and from a side pocket of his suit coat drew out a folded, crinkly City Beat and handed it to Quinn.
Quinn had seen the paper’s morning edition but pretended he hadn’t. TWIN SEEKS KILLER OF OTHER SELF, proclaimed the headline. Quinn scanned the story of the resurrection of the Carver investigation and vengeance delayed. It was spirited prose.
He handed the paper back to Renz. “Cindy Sellers. Where does she get that stuff?”
Renz stared at him as if they were playing poker and Quinn might buckle under pressure and display a tell. “Somebody’s talking, is where she’s getting it.”
“Maybe,” Quinn said, unperturbed. “Or maybe she’s making it up.”
“Whatever her source, Sellers has decided to be a pain in the ass.”
“First Amendment,” Quinn said.
“Yeah, yeah.” Renz wadded the City Beat into a tight ball and arced it gracefully into a nearby trash receptacle. He sat down heavily on the opposite end of the bench, causing it to rock slightly on uneven ground. “Whatever her source, she’s gonna continue writing this crap,” he said.
“That’s like her. She can’t be trusted.”
Renz looked over at the people tossing the balls and giving them backward spin. “What the hell are they doing over there? Bocce ball? Is it goddamned bocce ball?”
“I don’t know,” Quinn said. “It’s something else in life that puzzles me.”
“But you’re the sort who figures things out. For instance, you must know that with Sellers writing and blabbing about the Carver investigation all over town, the rest of the media wolves are gonna be hunting in packs. My assistant tells me our phones are already lit up with calls from the papers and television news. I had to make sure I wasn’t followed here by media schmucks.”
Quinn nodded. “Yeah, Sellers has changed things. Heated them up.”
Renz puffed on his cigar, then glanced at the glowing tip with satisfaction. “That’s why I’m reactivating you and your team. Or, to be more specific, the NYPD is hiring Quinn and Associates Investigations to help work on the reactivated Carver case.”