Twist

by John Lutz

  The killer didn’t like the way this was going. Not that he was blaming Helen, whom he’d come to admire. Quinn the puppet master was the one to blame. He was the one making things happen. Telling his people what to do. The killer thought about Pearl. He’d enjoy telling her what to do. Then there were the other two—Jody and Carlie. They might serve a purpose.

  Quinn wasn’t the only puppet master in this game.

  The killer drummed his fingers on the sofa arm. Maybe he would call in to the show. He knew Minnie would let him talk, though he wasn’t sure she’d allow a three-way conversation. For that matter, something about Helen frightened him. He wasn’t sure he wanted to speak to the towering profiler directly. The words sick and madness bothered him. Did Helen think she was a medical doctor or a psychologist? She was a goddamned profiler, that’s all. Sure, she knew her job, but it was one step up from handwriting analysis.

  Then why do I fear her?

  “What I’d like to talk about today,” Helen said, “is the nature of the victims’ injuries.”

  “Sounds lurid,” Minnie said, with obvious anticipation.

  “It is, I’m afraid, but I think it might help your viewers to better understand the sort of individual we’re dealing with, and who’s still walking the streets of New York.”

  Minnie smiled and leaned back in her chair. “We’re listening.”

  In a calm and unemotional tone, Helen described the nature of the damage inflicted on the victims before and after their deaths. She spared no horrendous detail, and the matter-of-factness of her voice made the injuries seem all the more horrible. For the most part, Helen looked into the camera as she spoke. Now and then, she’d glance over at Minnie Miner.

  Minnie was turning green.

  “I know this is strong stuff,” Helen said to Minnie and to the audience, “but I’m not here to entertain. I’m here to inform, and to alarm. Because we should be alarmed. Not panicked, but alarmed. A monster who looks and acts as we do, who blends into his environment like a chameleon, is stalking some of the women of this city. And what I’ve just described is the result of only some of the earlier encounters. I’ve left out the most vivid and gruesome.”

  “We can imagine,” Minnie said, swallowing. Her lipsticked mouth arced downward. She appeared ill.

  The unexpected had happened. Her show had become real, and reality lived in her stomach.

  Helen was glad to see Minnie make it through her polite thank-you to her guest, and then introduce the next commercial break. As the picture faded, viewers who looked quickly could see Minnie stand up, then double over with her arms crossed tightly against her abdomen. Some of her cast and crew hurried over and supported her so she wouldn’t fall.

  Nobody was paying much attention to Helen.

  The killer, ensconced before his flat-screen TV, noticed what was happening and wondered what all the fuss was about.

  Quinn remembered there was a voice mail message on his cell phone, but he didn’t have time to listen to it before his desk phone jangled.

  “You see Helen on TV this morning?” Renz asked, when Quinn had picked up.

  “Sure,” Quinn said. It was only eleven o’clock, but already the offices of Q&A were heating up toward what weather forecasters promised would be record high temperature.

  The air-conditioning units, set in the windows, were humming and banging away, fighting the good fight against the heat. Not losing quite yet, though Quinn was sure at least one of the units would ice up and stop operating before the sun went down and all that baking concrete outside would begin to cool.

  “Helen about made me barf,” Renz said.

  “That’s the plan. We don’t want the killer to get the idea the public sees him as some kind of underdog hero.”

  “That seems unlikely.”

  “In this city?”

  “Well, yeah, I see what you mean. Also,” Renz said, “I didn’t hear the word allegedly on Minnie’s show.”

  “You think a serial killer is going to sue for libel?” Quinn asked. He didn’t say there might be a remote possibility the killer was insane enough to attempt just that.

  “Not if we got the right guy,” Renz said.

  “We do,” Quinn assured him. “Otherwise he would have come forward all lawyered up to dispute the allegations. Anyway, we can’t lose either way.”

  “My kind of odds,” Renz said. Then the tone of his voice changed to one of officiousness. “Reason I phoned is I called in some chits with the FBI and got the file on that old Missouri case where the infant was ripped out of its mother’s womb.”

  “The FBI?”

  “Yeah. As long as the kid was thought to be alive, the Bureau viewed the crime as a possible kidnapping. According to the file, they showed up right away to assist the locals while they told them what to do.”

  Quinn understood. He remembered that Harlan Wilcoxen had mentioned the Bureau’s involvement.

  “They did do a good job of finding more information on the dead woman and her baby,” Renz said.

  “What kind of information?”

  “The victim’s full name was Abigail Taylor. Her folks were farmers,” Renz continued. “Country girl through and through. Never got in any trouble to speak of. Made decent grades but dropped out of high school her senior year to take a job as a waitress in a spaghetti joint. Told her folks she was bored with school.”

  “Sounds familiar,” Quinn said. “I wish you could tell me now that a movie producer stopped in at the restaurant where she worked, saw her, talked to her, and offered her a screen test. Stardom followed.”

  “I can’t tell you that, but you’re sorta right. That’s how she met the father of the child that was taken from her. He came in and ate lunch, then came back for supper. The next day, he returned for breakfast and the waitress. They got involved, moved in together. She got pregnant.”

  “Not a movie producer?”

  “That’s where it went wrong. The father was an auto mechanic, worked at a repair shop and drove a tow truck.”

  “Ambitious, anyway.”

  “Not so’s you’d notice. Word was the pregnancy showed so soon after the wedding it was unlikely the mechanic could have been the father. He and Abigail fought some, maybe about that, according to the file. The FBI saw him as a suspect for a while.”

  “What made them eliminate him?”

  “He and another fella were talking on hubby’s landline phone at the time of the murder-kidnapping, about Hubby being too hungover to come into work to do a brake repair job.” Quinn listened to Renz breathe for a few seconds. A fat man, and getting fatter, his weight was starting to drag him down. Finally Renz said, “The daddy didn’t have anything to do with what happened, Quinn. Day after Abigail was found, he drove his car straight into a bridge abutment. There were no skid marks. The speedometer was broken in the impact, stuck at ninety-seven miles an hour. Witnesses said it sounded like a thunderclap.”

  “Christ!”

  “Kid finds out he’s lost his woman, his baby, all in the same day, and in the worst way. Next day he took his own life.”

  Quinn thought for a while. “I suppose the FBI made sure later on about the father. I mean, with DNA testing and all.”

  “They did. Got blood from the placenta at the time of the crime to test for type. Tested some of it later for a DNA match. The kid was the daddy, all right. It’ll all be in the file I’m sending over. Name’s right there, supported by modern science. ‘Father: William James Wilcoxen.’ ”

  Quinn pressed the phone tighter to his ear. “Say again.”

  “Supported by modern science.”

  Quinn said, “Not that part.”

  39

  Quinn saw that the message on his cell phone was from Harlan Wilcoxen. He sat back and listened:

  “That conversation we had the other day?” Wilcoxen’s laconic voice said on the phone. “I gotta admit I didn’t play quite square with you. I kept some things from you, like why I was so interested in the Lady Lib
erty Killer case? Truth was, I wasn’t so interested in givin’ information to you as in gettin’ information from you. There was one piece of information I knew you’d come across once you got far enough into the FBI file. The dead woman’s husband? Billy Wilcoxen? He was my son, and it was my grandson who was ripped from his mother’s womb. It was my grandson that became Dred Gant, an’ who killed all them women. I’m hopin’ what additional information I’ve given you will be of some help. An’ that when you find Dred, you’ll remember Mildred Gant.”

  That was the end of the message. There was no good-bye, but still it gave Quinn the creeps.

  He motioned for Pearl to come over from where she was working at her desk.

  “Let’s take a ride,” he said, when she got close.

  “One I’m gonna like?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Let’s go then, before things get even worse.”

  On the drive to the Hayden Hotel in Quinn’s old Lincoln, he filled her in, and then let her listen to Wilcoxen’s message on his cell phone.

  “I don’t like any of it,” Pearl said, handing the phone back to Quinn. “From the content to the tone of his voice.”

  “He always uses uptalk,” Quinn said.

  “Uptalk?”

  “Says things that end in question marks when they aren’t questions. Kind of an upward glide. Must be a Missouri thing.”

  They stopped for a red light on Broadway. A guy in a ripped T-shirt and khaki shorts rapped his knuckles on the Lincoln’s hood and pointed to let Quinn know the front of the car was inside the crosswalk. Quinn unconsciously edged the big car forward even farther while waiting for the light to change. The look on his face scared Pearl. Scared the guy who’d tapped on the hood, too, judging by the way he picked up his pace. Quinn had a way of figuring out things before he realized he’d done so, before he put on his dead-eyed cop’s face.

  “You think we oughta call Renz?” Pearl asked. “Get a radio car over there before Wilcoxen checks out?” But she knew he wouldn’t check out; he’d simply leave. Probably he already had left. Wilcoxen was an old hand and knew the moves.

  “Let’s see what we got first, when we get to the hotel.”

  “Optimist.”

  “I don’t feel like one,” Quinn said.

  The light turned green and the Lincoln swooped across the intersection, causing a man wheeling his bike along the crosswalk to stop cold and make an obscene gesture. Pearl smiled. The pedestrians were frisky today.

  Quinn leaned on the horn, getting impatient. They were about fifteen minutes away from the hotel. Traffic was getting heavier as they moved downtown. Pearl phoned the Hayden. Wilcoxen was still registered, but he wasn’t in his room.

  “Maybe he’s in the bar, waiting for us to show up,” Quinn said, jockeying for position in the traffic.

  “Or maybe he doesn’t want to lend any more help to someone trying to get his grandson caught and shot to death or executed.”

  “Or maybe he does want to lend a hand in finding his grandson before more women are tortured to death.”

  “I’d guess both,” Pearl said.

  Quinn said, “There’s the problem.”

  The Hayden was a small hotel on Seventh Avenue, near enough to Times Square to have enjoyed some of the area’s resurgence. The lobby was more cozy than imposing, with walnut paneling, potted palms, and black leather armchairs that were unoccupied. A mildewed scent tainted the air, as if someone had just come up from a damp cellar and left the door open.

  There was a bar off the lobby, and Quinn detoured and glanced into it on his way to the front desk. Six people occupied bar stools or chairs. Two of them were women. None of them was Harlan Wilcoxen.

  Over near the desk, Pearl was using a house phone to call Wilcoxen’s room again.

  She put the receiver back on its hook and shook her head. Still no answer.

  Quinn saw no point in wasting time. He talked to a bellhop, who directed him to an attractive Hispanic woman behind the desk.

  The woman listened to Quinn, then called the manager on the phone. After a brief conversation, she made a subtle come-hither motion that produced a large, shambling man in a brown suit who looked exactly like what he was—the house detective. He said his name was Bert Salter.

  The manager appeared from a doorway behind the desk, then disappeared and emerged from another door on the lobby side of the desk. He was a lean, nervous man and introduced himself as Larry Castleman.

  Quinn, Pearl, the manager, and the house detective walked in a tight group to the elevators and rode one to the tenth floor, where Harlan Wilcoxen was registered in room 1057.

  Castleman knocked gently on the door, waited, then knocked harder. The house detective, Bert Salter, inhaled so his barrel chest swelled, then sighed loudly. Quinn thought Bert would have enjoyed kicking in the door, but the manager, a man of milder temperament, produced a card key and swished it.

  The card worked the first time.

  Bert moved to enter first, but Quinn eased in front of him, and the big house detective shuffled to the side.

  They moved cautiously at first. Then, satisfied that there was no immediate problem, they walked in and found the room unoccupied.

  A black leather suitcase rested on a foldable luggage stand. A wrinkled blue shirt was draped over the desk chair. Either the maid hadn’t been there yet or Wilcoxen had gone back to bed for a while. The spread and covers were mussed and turned back, and the rough outline of a human head was indented in the pillow.

  “Nothing,” the manager said, sounding relieved.

  “Both card keys are on the dresser,” Bert the house detective said.

  Quinn stood still. He’d smelled something. So did the others. All except the manager.

  It was subtle, but easy to identify. Blood. And a lot of it.

  Harlan Wilcoxen was in the bathtub, which was three-quarters full of an approximate mixture of half blood and half water. His eyes were closed, but he didn’t look peaceful. He looked pale and in troubled deep sleep. One of his hands was turned palm up, floating on the surface of the devil’s mix in the tub, and the broad cut in his wrist was visible.

  “Opened up his wrists,” Bert said. “Whatever kinda blade he used is underwater, where it isn’t visible.” He talked like a man who’d seen this kind of death before.

  On the closed toilet lid was a Bible that looked as if it had never been read. It was probably from the hotel nightstand drawer. It was weighting down a fat file folder that looked as if it contained copies or originals of everything that was in the file Wilcoxen had given to Quinn earlier.

  “Don’t anybody touch anything,” Bert said. He was an ex-cop, and this was his beat, after all.

  The manager looked at him as if he must have lost a gear somewhere, giving orders. “We’ve got a suicide here,” he said.

  Bert looked at Quinn, waiting.

  “We can’t be sure yet what we’ve got,” Quinn said.

  They all moved toward the door to the hall, while Quinn used his cell phone to get in touch with Renz.

  The killer, scanning the Times and Post at breakfast the next morning, saw an item about a former law enforcement officer from Missouri committing suicide in a Manhattan hotel yesterday.

  There were few details. Suicide wasn’t all that uncommon. The item would be of only passing interest to anyone other than the man’s family members, who, if they existed, weren’t mentioned.

  40

  Quinn sat at the dining room table in the brownstone with the two files on Dred Gant’s kidnapping from his mother’s womb.

  It seemed to him that three important things were made clear in the file that Wilcoxen had left in his hotel room.

  The first was that Dred Gant had somehow learned that Mildred Gant wasn’t his biological mother; but he still had no idea as to the identity of his real mother, or his father or grandfather.

  The second was that a week before she’d stolen the auctioneer’s money and injured the hig
hway patrolman thirteen years ago, Mildred had bought a state lottery ticket. It had turned out to be a winner.

  She hadn’t been the big winner, but big enough, especially considering her finances. Her winnings were a quarter of a million dollars. It was estimated that after taxes, this would amount to approximately one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. Some of it she used to make bail. Most of it she hid somewhere.

  Dred had been a teenager at the time. He might have learned about the lottery winnings, or he might not have. It would have been like Mildred to make sure he didn’t learn of it, so he couldn’t somehow get his hands on it.

  In the file was a yellowed newspaper clipping announcing Mildred’s good luck, along with that of some other winners. She’d bought her ticket at a combination gas station and convenience store off of Interstate 70 just outside of St. Louis, where she’d gone for an estate auction. The jackpot winner, an attractive unemployed schoolteacher who had lost her job after posing seductively with a nozzle for a firefighters’ calendar, had received three million dollars, and almost all of the newspaper ink. There was no photograph of Mildred, or any of the other lesser winners.

  The third important thing?

  Wilcoxen had been of the opinion that Mildred Gant not only had acted as a pimp for Dred, but had also molested him herself.

  Quinn sat back in his chair, mulling all of this over.

  Good God! How might that have affected a young boy, being sexually abused by his mother? Or the woman he assumed was his mother?

  A mother like Mildred Gant?

  And how must he have felt when, protected from him by prison walls, she took her own life?

  He had mauled her with a whip-like saw blade, but she had denied him his final ecstasy and release. His closure.

  Two questions: What had happened to Mildred’s money? And should any or all of this information be released to the media?

  Quinn thought the FBI might be sitting on much of the information, though he couldn’t be sure. The Bureau played whatever cards it held close to the vest. It was unlikely that they’d seen Wilcoxen’s expanded file, but they might have pieced together the information from other sources. Despite the jokes and feigned disdain about the “Feebs” that was present in a lot of metropolitan police departments, the Bureau was good at its job.