Slaughter

by John Lutz

  Quinn said, “Seems like a clue, Harley.”

  Renz, flushed and puffed up from the heat and pervasive smell, called for his limo to pick him up.

  Now that he’d delivered his message, Renz had little use for Quinn. He didn’t so much as glance in Quinn’s direction as the gleaming black town car with NYPD plates glided away.

  Only to reappear on the opposite side of the bomb blast area and fire damage. Maybe Renz had thought of something helpful. A clue.

  Quinn watched Renz from half a block’s distance. Renz was out of his car and talking to a woman with a microphone. Another woman was frantically leaping around the limo with a small camera, finding good angles for shots of Renz.

  Renz was helping her as much as possible. He removed his suit coat and rolled up his white shirtsleeves. He found a high spot in the debris so the photos would have a flattering upward angle. For some shots, he propped his fists on his hips and raised his chin. A portly Mussolini.

  Quinn watched and waited for a while, but he never saw Renz actually touch anything.

  That was Renz’s talent.

  48

  That evening, in his office, Renz was less circumspect in talking to Quinn. He knew there were no hidden video cameras or recorders here. And like a beast in his lair, he was most comfortable in familiar surroundings.

  The conversation was so amiable that Renz gave Quinn one of his best cigars and fired up an identical one for himself. He confided to Quinn that the cigars were illegal and from some South or Central American country that Quinn had heard of only in a Woody Allen movie. Now they were partners in crime.

  Quinn sat in a comfortable leather armchair, holding the cigar and a glass ashtray. The armchair faced Renz’s desk, behind which sat Renz. If the desk had been any bigger, Quinn thought, he might need to shout to be heard.

  “Now that we’re off the record we can talk,” Renz said.

  Quinn didn’t remember anything about being on or off the record, but he let it slide.

  Renz tilted back his head as if about to administer eye drops. He made a perfect O with his lips and blew an imperfect smoke ring.

  “Are we really getting any traction in finding this Gremlin bastard?” he asked. “Something or somebody we can toss to the media wolves?”

  Quinn blew a perfect smoke ring. “Tell them we’re making progress.”

  “They won’t believe me.”

  “They won’t believe you no matter what you say, so why waste the truth on them?”

  Renz chewed on his cigar but didn’t take smoke into his mouth. “This Gremlin guy would be easier for us to get a line on if he was a professional. But real experts in those fields always peg him as a talented amateur. New to his work, maybe, but he knew or learned enough about killing that he manages to make the hit and then get away unseen.” Renz produced a white handkerchief as big as a surrender flag and wiped his forehead and neck with it. Watching him made Quinn realize the office had gotten much warmer. It might have been the cigars, or the futility.

  “For instance, he knew how to neutralize all those elevator safety brakes in the Blenheim Building,” Renz went on. “All those floors.” He tapped ashes from his cigar into an ashtray on his desk and made a face suggesting he was nauseated. “God! All that bone sticking through flesh. And the fires! The arson guy said it took some knowledge and some jerry-rigging to bring off what this guy has done. Imagine the planning, learning what those buildings are made of, when and how they were constructed—their materials and vulnerabilities. He must have made studies before he made plans.”

  “You would think so,” Quinn said.

  “He knew where the flammable wooden support beams and joists were,” Renz said. “How the fire would dance its way through the place. Which walls were load-bearing. Everything that’d cause the fire to feed on itself and turn buildings into ovens.”

  “Fire seems to fascinate people who like gadgets.”

  “Does it follow that people who like gadgets like to kill?”

  Quinn thought about that. “People who like gadgets want to know about how the insides of things work. They can only gain that deeper understanding through careful observation and examination. Which is why our gremlin has a compulsion to disassemble things so he can study them. Even women.”

  “So he thinks that by abduction and torture he can learn about women?” Renz looked skeptical.

  “Only some things,” Quinn said. “Other things he’ll learn in other ways. We have to learn those things, too, if we’re going to find him.”

  “It sounds reasonable when you say it,” Renz told Quinn. He snubbed out his cigar.

  Quinn took that as a signal from Renz that their tête-à-tête was finished.

  Quinn didn’t think so. Still seated, he said, “There is something you might toss to the circling news vultures, Harley. Tell them we’re studying closed-circuit security camera stills and videos of people at the Taggart Building fire. The people in the street, observing the flames. Images from before, during, and after the explosions and fire. We think we might be able to do a facial match with the killer and the artist’s rendering. Mix in a picture of Kray as a youth, and we may come up with some positive identification.”

  Renz looked surprised. “Are we doing all that?”

  “As soon as you supply the cameras and cassettes.”

  “Nobody uses cassettes anymore,” Renz said.

  Quinn ignored him and stood up. He knew Renz had the political clout to get whatever he needed to get something done in a rush. The man had his connections. That was how it worked. The favor would also subtract from Renz’s stock of favors owed. Some might sniff weakness, but who knew if there really were such images that hadn’t been destroyed?

  Renz stood up and said, “You are really a prick, Quinn.”

  As Quinn was leaving, he paused at the door and said, “Nice cigar, Harley. But it’s only that.”

  When Quinn arrived at Q&A, he found Jerry Lido there, along with Pearl and Fedderman.

  Sal and Harold were still occupied interviewing witnesses to the bombing and burning. Sal had called earlier and talked to Pearl. She’d told him two witnesses had surfaced and reported glimpsing a child of about twelve running and dancing through the flames. Neither witness had gotten a good look at the quick, lithe figure.

  Pearl gave Sal and Harold names and addresses and sicced them on the witnesses.

  “Could have been a small adult,” said one of the witnesses, a hard-looking but glamorous woman named Philipa.

  “Or a large child,” Harold said.

  They were in her living room, in a modest but cozy ground-floor apartment that looked out at ankle level at passersby on the sidewalk. It was on the upwind side of the field of wreckage left by the explosions and fire. Half the buildings on the block looked untouched, in contrast to the others.

  Harold wondered about Philipa’s ethnicity. She had a certain earthy magnetism that intrigued him. When she caught Harold staring at her breasts, she gave him a look that startled him with its clarity of meaning. She knew what he was thinking she was thinking, but he was wrong.

  Exactly.

  “I was just curious about your ethnicity,” he said, laying it all out there. “Where you’re from.”

  “Philipistan,” she said. “And before you ask, yes, I am named after my country.”

  “Like Odessa,” Harold said.

  Sal glared at him. “Or Miss Australia.”

  Philipa’s husband entered the room then, and that was that.

  “I wasn’t here during the event,” he said. Meaning he had nothing to add, and neither did his wife. Interview over.

  Harold thought “event” was an odd thing to call a bombing and conflagration. And to Harold, the man didn’t look at all Philipistanese. More Irish.

  “Thanks for your cooperation,” Sal told the husband, feigning dead seriousness. He gave the wife one of his cards. “If you remember anything else, please call.”

  As Philipa accepte
d the card, she glanced at him, then up and to the side. Something in her eyes sent the ancient wordless message: I know you know I know . . .

  “Where exactly is—” Harold began, as Sal pushed him out the door to the hall.

  Back in the unmarked, with its engine and air conditioner running, Sal riffled through the many interviews. What he and his fellow detectives were doing didn’t seem productive, but he knew how some small item or phrase, or even silence, could unexpectedly yield up a fact or physical piece of evidence. He squeezed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. Some people thought doing that could help to make a headache go away. Sal wasn’t one of those people. His headache had a name: Harold.

  They drove for a while, Sal behind the wheel. He knew that sooner or later something would click. The trick was to recognize it when it happened. The legwork of the investigation was only beginning. When a little time had passed, the same witnesses could be interviewed again. Differences or contradictions in the results could be useful.

  Sal continued to drive what he thought was the perimeter of the recent catastrophe. Harold sat and fiddled with his iPhone.

  Fifteen minutes passed before Harold spoke: “It’s nowhere on Google.”

  “What’s that, Harold?”

  “Philipistan. As far as Google’s concerned, it doesn’t exist.”

  After a while, Harold muttered, “Those countries come and go. Sometimes they even overlap.”

  Back at Q&A, Quinn sat slouched in his desk chair and listened while Sal and Harold read their reports in noticeably weary voices. Quinn didn’t mind, not only because he wasn’t doing the drone work on the Gremlin chase, but because he believed that sometimes what’s not noticed in one sense is noticed in another. Listening to reports differed a shade from reading them to oneself. Quinn had once persuaded Pearl to touch her tongue to a sheet of paper to see if it tasted the same as the rest of the paper in a tablet. The papers had tasted the same, but Quinn pretended that one was more acidic than the other, which convinced a suspect to roll over and implicate his codefendant in a series of burglaries.

  I know that you know I know . . .

  49

  St. Louis, Missouri, 1999

  The Happy Brat sandwich shop was close enough to the ballpark that, when the ball club was in town, there was no shortage of customers. Fran and Willie had opened the place after the previous owner had put it up for sale and retired to Kissimmee, Florida. They had themselves retired two years ago, almost died of boredom, and saw it as their fate to at least make an offer when the diner went on the market. Their offer was rock bottom, but the owner knew them and liked them. And sold them the Happy Brat.

  Willie was a big man, and strong, but he was in his seventies now. His hair was thinning and gray, his back bent, but his arms were still powerful. There was a hitch in his gait. He knew he’d soon have to have a hip replacement. Fran was wiry and stronger than she looked, but she, like Willie, was surprised to discover that retirement had been wearing. They needed help, full-time and part. A fellow retiree, Henry Lodge, who was a longtime friend of Willie’s, bought a percentage of the diner and sometimes spent weekdays there with them. There were days when business dragged.

  When the Cardinals ball club was in town, it was another story. The Happy Brat couldn’t afford much, but hired a series of short-order cooks and countermen to handle the additional business. Henry helped, especially on those busy days when the Chicago Cubs were in town for day games. Baseball fans loved bratwurst on a bun with sauerkraut and mustard. And what could go better with that than beer, which Fran and Willie sold on draught and ice cold?

  All went well beneath the neon bratwurst on a bun sign until, during a long home stand, a need for a dishwasher and sometimes short-order cook became too obvious to ignore.

  This home stand, the Cardinals stayed in town almost three weeks. Fran was beginning to look haggard and tired all the time. Willie and Henry took to sniping at each other.

  “Enjoy the backbreaking work while you can,” Willie was fond of saying. “There’ll be plenty of slow days in our future.”

  But this was the present, profitable even if it was a test for nerves. The economy was such that it would be easy to hire temporary help, maybe for the rest of the baseball season.

  Hiring seemed the solution to their problem.

  Fran put a help-wanted sign in the lower right corner of the window, and within an hour the kid turned up. He was small, said he actually wanted to become a jockey. But things other than horses were slow at the track across the river in Illinois, so he was looking for a job he could do for a while.

  Fran, who was at the register, listened carefully to the boy, and motioned for him and Willie to come to her end of the counter where she could take part in the job interview.

  Up close the boy looked to be in his teens. Willie, with his aging linebacker’s body, dwarfed him. The kid wasn’t the cleanest, but he probably hadn’t planned on seeing a help-wanted sign. The hand-printed sign also said “part-time,” down at the bottom, but that was okay, if a person was getting desperate.

  “What’s your name?” Fran asked.

  “Pablo Diaz.”

  She looked at him for what seemed a long time. Then: “You don’t look Mexican.”

  “On my father’s side,” he said, as if that explained any questions about his ethnicity.

  Fran was the practical one, but there was something about this boy that made her feel maternal. A basic goodness that was more than youthful idealism. On the minus side, there was something he was holding back.

  Fran decided to put it aside, for now. “If he’s not afraid of hard work, I say we hire him.”

  “Can we do that on our own?” Willie asked. “Remember, there’s three of us that own this place.”

  “Henry might make it two out of three, if it comes to a vote. But I don’t think he would. Ain’t no reason not to hire this lad.”

  “What about the girl?” Willie asked.

  When no one answered, Fran said, “She tells me her name’s May, and she and the boy are married.”

  “We hiring her, too?” Willie asked.

  “Not likely. She don’t look strong enough to lift a pea.”

  “They’ll fool you, though, those country girls.”

  “You think any of that’s true?”

  “I dunno. Do you?”

  “Like I’m married to Robert Redford,” Fran said.

  50

  New York, the present

  Despite the effectiveness of Lido’s software, the composite image of the alleged Gremlin struck a note with no one. Possibly when finally they ran the Gremlin to ground, there would be no real resemblance.

  “This guy,” Harley Renz said, “is at least as lucky as he is tricky.”

  He and Quinn were seated on a bench in one of Manhattan’s pocket parks. Though it was near a busy street, the park had a lot of greenery. It seemed more private than it was. A man in a gray suit and a woman with a ponytail sat on another bench, side by side and facing away from Quinn and Renz. The woman appeared now and then to toss bread crumbs to the pigeons. Three of the birds seemed to take turns in pecking at the gift of bread. Others stood nearby and solemnly observed. Quinn knew what they were thinking, like all the earth’s creatures: It might be a trap.

  “Nobody’s called in with any information or identification of our artist’s rendering of the Gremlin,” Renz said. “Probably if anybody gets a good look at him, they still won’t have paid enough attention to recognize him from that composite.”

  “It hasn’t worked so far,” Quinn admitted. He was wondering why Renz had suggested this meeting.

  He didn’t have to wait long to find out.

  “We’ve got another victim,” Renz said. “Woman over on West Seventy-seventh Street. Dora Palm.”

  Quinn felt the stab of anger and sadness that he always felt when informed of a victim, especially a victim given a name. Somehow the name made the murder even more grotesque, the vi
ctim more real and alive—a person with a past and present. Until a short time ago, a future. “Any doubt it was the Gremlin?”

  “None. The ME even says he can tell it was the same blade. Says the killer used a sharp knife here and there, but a jigsaw for hard to reach parts or heavy-duty cutting.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “Last night around ten o’clock. After a steak dinner with a good Merlot. At least she got that.”

  “We all get that,” Quinn said, “sometimes not knowing when it’s coming. Maybe it’s better that way.”

  “Or not.”

  “Crime Scene techs find anything useful?”

  “Not yet. But they’re still looking. Why I called you about this one was to warn you to be careful.”

  “Careful of what?”

  “What you say. Who you say it to. Extra careful. This is a somewhat complicated case.”

  Quinn leaned back on the bench, watching the woman with the ponytail feeding the pigeons. “Tell me what I need to know, Harley.”

  “You like dogs?”

  “Depends on what kind.”

  “Greyhounds.”

  “A couple of them have run fast enough to win me money—but not much.”

  “We’re talking about a racing dog,” Renz said. “Here’s to You.”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s the dog’s name.”

  “This a racing dog?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Renz said. “It’s a dog.”

  “How old?”

  “About eight years.”

  Quinn understood now what Renz was trying to say. “Here’s to You was probably a rescue dog, saved from an abbreviated life by some animal lovers’ organization that arranged homes for dogs that found themselves without owners. Here’s to You was probably adopted by Dora Palm when it retired from racing. Along with its new owner, it had been killed by the Gremlin.”

  “You might say the killer autopsied the dog,” Renz said.

  Quinn thought that over. “The bastard wanted to see why it could run so fast.”