by John Lutz
Quinn was surprised, but he shouldn’t have been. Renz could always be counted on to come up with some kind of bold countermove. Usually one that furthered his career. “So the popular and daring police commissioner goes outside the NYPD again for the public good and safety.”
“You forgot imaginative,” Renz said.
“Imagine that.”
“Our arrangement has proved successful in the past. And when you weren’t on the Carver case, we weren’t able to close it. This time around, I’m hitching my wagon to a winner.” Again, Renz’s doglike smile. “I’ll get some NYPD shields to you so you and your team can come and go at crime scenes unmolested, maybe wrangle some free doughnuts.”
“Is there a possibility of discussing whether I agree to this?” Quinn asked.
“Not really, considering Cindy Sellers has shot our previous agreement all to hell. It isn’t worth much now that the media seem to be getting shovelfuls of information on this case. Matter of days before our more vocal members of the public—some of them political office holders—will be demanding that the case actually gets solved.”
“You’ve gone from trying to scare me off this case to hiring me to continue my investigation,” Quinn pointed out.
“That’s called being outmaneuvered.”
Quinn had nothing to say to that. After all, the investigation was not only going to continue, but at an accelerated rate. So who’d been outmaneuvered?
“You’ll be initiating the NYPD investigation and consolidating it with what you have so far,” Renz said. “I’m assigning a detective team to work with you. You’ll be lead detective, of course. And you’ll report to me.”
“Do I have a choice?” Quinn asked again.
“Stop asking me that. It’s annoying. You don’t want a choice. You got what you wanted.” Renz watched the people playing with the wooden balls for a while. “There was a lot of spin on that ball you tossed me the other day,” he said.
“Conversational ball, you mean?”
“Whatever.”
They both sat quietly observing the people playing the mysterious game with the balls.
“I think they’re trying to knock their opponents’ balls out of a circle,” Quinn said.
“The thing to remember,” Renz said around the smoldering cigar wedged in his jaw, “is that, like in most games, they take turns.”
Quinn had been warned. It didn’t much concern him.
Renz nodded knowingly and smiled his jowly smile, then stood up from the bench and sauntered toward Sixth Avenue.
Quinn sat watching him walk away. He knew that when it was Renz’s turn, the ambitious police commissioner would make the most of it. And he wasn’t above playing out of turn.
It must be liberating to be so blithely corrupt.
As soon as Renz had disappeared, Quinn lit a Cuban cigar.
18
“It’s better than having him shut down the investigation,” Quinn said, after returning to the Seventy-ninth Street office and telling Pearl and Fedderman about his conversation with Renz.
The air conditioner wasn’t very efficient, and the air was still and muggy and smelled, as it often did, of subversive cigar smoke.
Fedderman had his suit coat off and his tie knot loosened. The top button of his shirt was undone. Pearl had a shimmer of perspiration above her upper lip that somehow looked good on her.
Neither of Quinn’s two detectives was crazy about the idea that the NYPD had landed with both flat feet in the middle of their investigation.
“Did we plan for this development?” Pearl asked.
“Not exactly,” Quinn said. “We’ll have to improvise.”
“They do that in comedy clubs,” Fedderman said.
“We’ll try not to make it funny.”
“At least we’ll be working with Vitali and Mishkin again,” Fedderman said.
The NYPD homicide team of detectives Sal Vitali and Harold Mishkin had shared the load with Quinn, Pearl, and Fedderman in a previous serial killer case. The gravel-voiced, intense Vitali and the deceptively meek Mishkin were a crack team and meshed well with Quinn and his crew.
Pearl, who’d been working her computer, sat back and stretched her arms, clenching and unclenching her fists as if she were working little exercise balls. “It’d be nice, though, if we had a client.”
“We do,” Fedderman said. “We just can’t find her. Pearl keeps checking her computer, but Chrissie’s not on Face-book or YouTube or any of the other mass Internet connectors. There are some people there looking for dates, though, so Pearl’s not giving up.”
“I got a YouTube for you,” Pearl said.
“Wouldn’t doubt it.”
Pearl fumed. Fedderman liked that. Quinn didn’t, but he hesitated in acting as referee when Pearl and Fedderman went at each other. Their frequent bickering seemed to stimulate their little gray cells.
“Ease up,” was all he said, and not with much conviction.
Pearl swiveled slightly in her chair to look directly at him. “Did you mention to Cindy Sellers that we can’t seem to locate our client?”
“Slipped my mind.”
“Sure it did.” Pearl knew better than to believe that. Hardly anything slipped Quinn’s mind.
Having forgotten for now about Fedderman and his jibes, Pearl smiled. Quinn thought she was beautiful when she smiled while still flush with anger. It was amazing the way she could switch gears like that. Like speed-shifting a race car.
“She called here while you were talking to Renz,” Fedderman said.
“Sellers?”
“The same. Pearl took the call.”
“I can’t stand that woman,” Pearl said.
“That’s just because she has no taste, compassion, or ethics,” Fedderman said.
“I can stand you,” Pearl said. “Barely, sometimes, and in short doses, but I can stand you.”
Quinn was getting fed up with the verbal rock fight. What were they, in high school? But he knew it was because they were stymied in their investigation. Couldn’t even find their client. “What did Sellers want, Pearl?”
“The usual. Answers. I didn’t give her any.”
“What did you give her?”
“That high school yearbook photo. The one we found on the Internet when we realized Chrissie hadn’t included any in the clippings she gave us. Sellers wanted a photo of Tiffany to run with her City Beat story.”
“Did Sellers bitch because you gave her such an old photograph?” Fedderman asked.
“No. She’ll do what we did: scour the Internet and build her own file of photos.”
“She’s probably good at that,” Fedderman said. “It’s what reporters do nowadays. Not much legwork left in the job. Not like being a cop.”
“Hmph,” Pearl said, which irritated Fedderman. It was hard to know if she was agreeing or disagreeing.
She sat forward. “I went through the clippings Chrissie gave us again, to make doubly sure, and there were photos of all the victims except for the last. Then I went on the Internet again.” She wrestled her chair up closer to her desk and worked her computer. “There are some great shots.” She moved the mouse across its pad and clicked it. “Like this one. It’s from an old Daily News. Looks like a studio portrait when she was still a teenager. Tiffany sure was a terrific-looking kid.”
Quinn angled to his left so the glare from the window didn’t obscure the image on Pearl’s computer screen. He stepped closer.
The image was of a news item with the victim’s photo inset on the right. Tiffany’s name was printed beneath the black-and-white head shot of a pretty brunette with dark eyes and a glowing and somewhat naive smile. Young woman with a bright future, the caption should have read, rather than Latest Carver victim.
“Exactly the Carver victim type,” Pearl said. “Attractive, with dark hair and eyes, good cheekbones, generous mouth.”
You, Quinn thought, but didn’t say it.
“Tiffany fits right in. Our client does
, too, but not exactly.”
“She can’t be Chrissie,” Fedderman said.
“So who is she?” Quinn asked. “And why’s she done a runner?”
“I might be able to answer your first question,” Pearl said. “As I recall, she never said she and Tiffany were identical twins. She is Chrissie Keller, Tiffany’s fraternal twin.”
“She sure let us assume they were identical twins,” Fedderman said. “I mean, with her story about wanting Quinn to think at first he was looking at one of the Carver’s victims. Shock persuasion.”
“Feds is right,” Quinn said. “She led us in that direction.”
“So she lied,” Pearl said. “My God, what a surprise!”
Quinn and Fedderman looked at each other.
In a corner of his mind, Fedderman had mulled over Pearl’s suggestion. “Pearl’s got a point,” he said. “They might be fraternal twins. But me, I’m not so sure.”
“Either way, she’s been dicking around with us,” Pearl said.
“Still is,” Fedderman said. “Playing a game.”
“We’ll give her game,” Pearl said.
The two detectives’ animosity was forgotten, lost in the fervor of the hunt. Quinn almost smiled. Cooking now…
“We need to find out why she lied,” Fedderman said.
Pearl nodded. “We need to find her.”
19
The Carver sat in his room in Midtown Manhattan and watched the long, angular shadow cast by the afternoon sun move as inexorably as fate across the wall of the building across the street.
He’d taken to sitting in the same comfortable imitation Herman Miller chair and studying the same view.
It wasn’t really much of a view—simply rows and rows of windows. In the way of countless rows of windows in New York, they overwhelmed the eye so that all of them seemed impersonal, at least from a distance.
The Carver used high-powered Bausch & Lomb binoculars to close that distance and get to know on a more personal basis the people in the offices across the street. The interesting people, that is. Not the simple working drones. They didn’t provide much entertainment.
But the interesting people were something else. Of course, it took time and a lot of watching to locate the interesting ones; and the intriguing thing was, a few of the drones, after you watched them for a while, turned out to be interesting once you got to know and understand them.
There was the insurance guy who spent most of his time masturbating or tossing darts at a poster of Angelina Jolie. The woman office manager who, locked in her own office, drank to excess and was having a hot affair that involved bondage with one of her female underlings. More conventional romance was a regular feature on the other side of a windowpane where the building stair-stepped to rise another ten floors. There a middle-aged bald man—the Carver had never figured out what sort of position he held—had at least three sexual trysts per week with a long-legged blond woman who was quite spectacular and didn’t seem to frequent that floor of the building except for services rendered to the man.
A high-priced prostitute?
No. She didn’t have that look about her, and she didn’t carry a purse or large bag. She seemed to work elsewhere in the building, though the Carver had never figured out where. She was definitely one of the interesting people.
Considering the size of the building, all of this didn’t really seem an excessive amount of interesting activity. In fact, it was barely enough to keep the Carver occupied. Most of those whom he considered his unknowing “family” held some fascination, but less each day. They all seemed to be on treadmills of risk and relentlessness that would result in wearing out their luck. And like everything else, luck did eventually wear out.
The Carver knew when not to push his luck. When not to use it up unnecessarily. And that resulted in a knack for sensing exactly when to leave the party.
He had left the best party of his life at precisely the right time. He’d gotten away with murder. Five times. While the police were aimlessly dashing around and bouncing off bad ideas like blind mice. He was proud of that.
The experts were wrong, of course. Serial killers didn’t necessarily finally fall victim to their compulsion. Sometimes it worked just as it was supposed to, exactly as they wanted it to work. They fed their compulsion, and they became sated.
He hadn’t been much alarmed when television and newspapers suddenly became more interesting. When he learned that the Carver murders were being reinvestigated, and by Frank Quinn.
The Carver had always regretted that the famous serial killer hunter was injured and laid up in a hospital, or pensioned off and involved in litigation, during the time of most of his greatest achievements. Quinn hadn’t had a chance to hunt for the Carver. The famous detective had been gunned down and seriously injured at the scene of a completely unrelated crime. A mundane liquor store holdup.
But Quinn was on the case now, years later, when the trail was so cold that solving the crimes would be almost impossible.
None of what had happened more than five years ago mattered much now, or provided any sort of handle for a reopened investigation. Time had built a wall and then an impenetrable fortress around the Carver.
Maybe it was because he was invulnerable that he avidly followed news of the present investigation. Possibly he was waiting for news of Mary Bakehouse. So far, none had appeared. He had spared her, but always she’d carry a part of him with her because now he was a part of her. He lived in her brain and being. That might be a burden too heavy for her, too painful. She would probably try to hide from that burden, run from it, maybe all the way to the other side of the country. But it wouldn’t work. He would always be with her. He wouldn’t be surprised if he picked up the paper one day and read of Mary’s suicide. Perhaps he’d claim her as a victim after all.
Would it all begin again then?
No! He was finished with those times, those deeds. Thoughts. That was all he had now, and all he wanted. He didn’t need Mary Bakehouse’s death to fuel old embers. He could think about her any time he wanted, any way he wanted.
Mary was why he followed the news. Mere curiosity.
But he knew better. He tracked the news because old memories had stirred, and what lay dormant in him all those years, since what he’d considered to be his last murder, had slowly awakened and was pacing in his breast, sharing his heartbeats. A demon roused from its dreams.
He found that frightening.
He found it exhilarating.
Pearl surfaced from her subway stop that evening and trudged through the humid dusk toward her apartment. The softened light gave the city a dreamlike quality, as if she were viewing it through a fine screen. What did they call it in theater? A scrim. This momentary surreal view of New York was beautiful, in its way. It painted a place where any dream might come true, as well as any nightmare.
The meeting with Vitali and Mishkin had left Pearl feeling vaguely dissatisfied, though she didn’t know why. The two NYPD detectives had listened carefully while Quinn filled them in on the investigation and then gave them copies of whatever paperwork there was, including the clipping files given to them by Chrissie Keller—if the woman had been Chrissie Keller. Vitali and Mishkin had turned copies of the murder books over to Quinn and Associates. Everyone had been polite and professional, and nothing had really changed except that there were two more warm bodies on the case, representing Harley Renz’s political ass-covering. Nobody knew any more after the meeting than before.
“At least,” Harold Mishkin had said from under his brushy, graying mustache, “we’re all getting paid. I mean, with the economy and all.”
“That’s something,” Quinn had said, exchanging glances with Sal Vitali, who was grinning.
“Harold always takes the practical view,” Vitali said.
Pearl couldn’t keep her mouth shut. “It isn’t practical to have a client we can’t find, while we’re investigating murders that happened over five years ago, committed by a killer w
ho, for all we know, is dead or living in another city.”
“What?” Vitali growled in his gravel-pan voice. “You wanna quit?”
Pearl sighed. “Can’t.”
“The economy,” Mishkin said.
“Not the economy,” Pearl said.
Vitali winked at her and shrugged. “We soldier on.”
“Only practical thing to do,” Quinn said, standing up.
And the meeting was over.
He watched his detectives trail from the office. They looked eager but tired. They knew that most of the case, the hardest part, still lay ahead of them. Phase two of the investigation had begun. It was one of those forks in the road nobody would consider significant until they looked back at it while driving over a cliff.
PART II
From their folded mates they wander far,
Their ways seem harsh and wild:
They follow the beck of a baleful star,
Their paths are dream beguiled.
—RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON, “Black Sheep”
20
Pearl stopped and stood on the curb, waiting for a traffic light to flash the walk signal. Her gaze fell on a glowing sign in a window across the street: HITS AND MRS. She’d been walking past the place forever and noticed now for the first time that it was a lounge. Its wide front window was dark because of narrow-slatted blinds behind it. The only thing displayed in the window was the glowing red sign.
She was more thirsty than hungry, and she’d had enough lack of progress for one day. Hits and Mrs. looked respectable enough, maybe because it was next to Love Blooms, a florist specializing in weddings. Pearl wondered if she was the only one who saw a connection between the two businesses. Might they be in cahoots?
After the meeting with Vitali and Mishkin, featuring Quinn’s stoicism and Fedderman’s usual bullshit, she decided she owed herself a drink. She changed direction and crossed the intersection at a ninety-degree angle to her previous course, not quite beating the light.