by John Lutz
7
A few of the New York media carried the Nickleton story. One local daily news program, Minnie Miner ASAP, mentioned the fact that what had become a string of ocean-side murders was moving along the coast toward New York. Quinn, and Renz, knew it might not be long before the nasty news genie was out of the bottle.
“Something in the mail for you,” Pearl said.
They were in the living room of the brownstone, and she’d just brought up what looked like the usual assortment of mail from the box downstairs.
Quinn held out his hand and she placed in it a small package wrapped in brown paper and tape.
“Looks familiar,” Pearl said. “Except for the North Carolina postmark. Same mechanical looking untraceable printing.”
“Where’s Jodi?”
“Outside. She’s a big enough girl she can be in on this,” Pearl said about her daughter, the attorney.
“If she happens to walk in on it,” Quinn said.
Pearl didn’t reply, knowing it wasn’t the time to get into an argument about what Jodi should or shouldn’t know. She watched Quinn sit on the sofa and, leaning forward, use a penknife he carried and carefully open the package.
Inside were a wadded sheet of Nickleton newspaper and a plastic chess pawn.
8
They were in the Q&A offices, the part that resembled a squad room, and that prospective clients first saw when they came in through the street door. It was a little past nine in the morning. Fedderman and Quinn were the only ones there.
A leather sole scuffed on concrete outside and the street door swished open.
“He’s working his way up the East Coast,” Jerry Lido said when he’d made his way all the way into the office. He’d bumped the door frame as he entered.
Quinn figured Lido was hungover. Not drunk. Lido worked best when he was soused, but he never came into the office that way.
Hardly ever.
His shirt was sloppily tucked in and he needed a shave. Since he’d obviously been drinking last night, Quinn listened closely to what he had to say.
Lido plopped himself down and booted up his computer. “Another murder farther north on the southeast coast,” he said.
“A killer with a compass,” Fedderman said.
Lido ignored him, as if maybe he figured Fedderman was an hallucination. “He started his latest killing binge in Miami, then maybe one in Pompano Beach, then Spindrift, and now Nickleton.” He brought a map up on his computer monitor. “He’s traveling up the coast, stopping and killing approximately the same distance between murders.”
Quinn paid closer attention, and walked over to look past Lido’s shoulder at the map.
“The murders were committed here, here, here, and here,” Lido said, pointing with a tremulous forefinger.
“That doesn’t look like the same distance between them,” Quinn said.
“I’m not referring to driving distance,” Lido said, “though he’s almost certainly driving. Sometimes the road curves along with the coast.”
“You’re saying as the crow flies,” Fedderman said.
Lido grinned. “More like the flamingo. And while the distances aren’t exactly the same, they increase proportionally.”
“So he’s traveling north, right now,” Quinn said. “Driving farther between each murder.”
Lido shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. He’s in a pattern, like so many serial killers, but we can’t be sure he realizes that. Or that he follows it every time.”
“He’s a beach killer,” Fedderman said. “That’s another pattern. He kills on or near a beach.”
Lido shrugged. “The Miami murder was several blocks away from the beach.”
“So what do you think it means?” Quinn asked Lido. “This crow’s—or flamingo’s—flight distance instead of car odometer distance?”
“Means he’s using a map,” Lido said. “Like we are.”
Fedderman walked over and the three of them stood at the computer as Lido pointed to Nickleton, and then traced his nicotine yellowed finger over the map to the projected site of the next murder.
It was the small beachside town of Del Moray.
None of them had ever heard of it.
Pearl, Sal, and Harold arrived, and Quinn explained the situation to them.
“There might be something to it,” Sal said, rubbing his chin. “Or it could be coincidence.”
“There’s no such thing as coincidence,” Harold said. “Not if you’re a mystic or a cop.”
Quinn wondered what Harold meant by that. Maybe only Harold knew.
Pearl said, “If the killer is on his way, or planning on going to Del Moray, he’ll be looking for his next victim.”
Quinn knew where she was trying to take the conversation and didn’t like it. “Don’t get any ideas about being bait,” he said. “Besides, you’re not his type.”
But he knew she could be bait, easily. Her features were those of a much younger woman, and her lithe, buxom body only strengthened the illusion. Quinn decided to leave the age issue alone.
“You can’t stop a woman from dying her hair,” Pearl said.
“All the killer’s victims have been on the social networks online,” Lido said.
“I can join them,” Pearl said.
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Quinn told her.
“But we’re going to do it,” Pearl said.
“What makes you think so?”
Pearl smiled. “Because it might work.”
9
Del Moray wasn’t much to look at. Its police department and a strip shopping center faced the public beach across the street. The beach widened in both directions, but some of the clapboard houses and small businesses backed up to it. It was still technically mostly public beach, but few people strayed north to directly across from police headquarters, or south to the line of motels, all low two stories so the view of the Atlantic wouldn’t be spoiled.
It wasn’t a large stretch of beach, and Pearl was a beauty as a blonde. She would definitely be noticed. Propped on the bridge of her nose were knockoff Prada sunglasses, thick-framed and dark enough that you couldn’t tell for sure where she was looking. In her white-and-blue terrycloth beach bag was her ID, a pullover shirt, a pair of rubber flip-flops, and her Glock handgun rolled in a towel. She wore a two-piece blue bathing suit that Quinn didn’t approve of but that kept catching his eye.
Quinn thought maybe they had overdone it. The way most of the males on the beach were looking at Pearl, it would be difficult to choose a prospective killer.
Nothing out of the ordinary happened the first day, or the second, except that Pearl got a nice tan.
Sal was pretending to sunbathe and listen to music on an earbud, not too close to where Pearl lounged, but close enough to get to her if somebody tried to abduct her. The most likely thing to happen would be for the killer to strike up a conversation. That had happened a couple of times. One of the men turned out to be a Del Moray cop. The other was interrupted by his wife and departed chastised.
Pearl seemed to be enjoying herself.
It was six o’clock, and she’d left the beach and was changing clothes in her room, when it happened. The key grated in the lock, and a man entered. He was wearing dark pleated slacks and a white shirt and looked like one of the employees who were around the motel doing odd jobs.
Except he was holding a gun.
As soon as Pearl looked into his eyes, she knew who he was. Not only that. It was also obvious that he knew who she was. Her legs went rubbery. Fedderman or Sal, or whoever’s shift it was, should have seen the man enter her room.
But she knew her motel-room door couldn’t be watched all the time.
“No one saw me come in,” her visitor said, reading her mind. “I entered this morning with the maid and stayed.” He used a foot to lift the skirt on the bed and revealed the maid’s dead arm and hand.
“Now what?” Pearl asked, in a wavering voice not quite her own, wondering if she could
reach her beach bag and Glock before the killer could react.
She decided it was too risky.
“Listen,” she said, thinking she might brave it out. “I’m—”
He stepped closer and punched her in the stomach. So fast. No one would have had time to react, to stop the punch.
Struggling to breathe, Pearl dropped to her knees. He produced a large role of duct tape, but he didn’t tape her in his usual fashion. While she was still paralyzed and breathless from the punch, he taped her arms to her sides, her hands to the outside tops of her thighs. Then he taped her ankles and knees.
She was breathing through her nose with effort now, wondering if she’d be able to scream. He smiled at her, knowing what she was thinking, and a wide rectangle of tape was slapped over her lips. More tape over her mouth, then wound around the back of her neck and head. No scream was going to erupt from her. It was all she could do to keep calm and breathe.
He rolled her under the bed then, as if she were a log, and she found herself lying shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, with the dead maid. She saw the glint of the maid’s bulging eye and knew the woman had been strangled, which was why there was no blood. Except for their two bodies, it was tidy under the bed.
Pearl knew that audacious as it was, this had all been planned, and it was working. That scared the hell out of her.
A few minutes later, she thought she heard the door to her room open and close, but couldn’t be sure.
“Where the hell is Pearl?” Quinn asked, standing outside the motel’s cocktail lounge. They had a clear view of the beach. It was late in the day but sunbathers still lounged, children still splashed, bodybuilders still strutted, lovers still used the cover of the incoming waves to grope each other. A larger than usual swell assaulted the beach and destroyed a sand castle.
Sal shrugged. “She left the beach more than half an hour ago. I looked in her room. She’s not there, and that big cloth bag she carries like a purse is gone.”
“Maybe she drove out to get something to eat,” Fedderman suggested. He’d been assigned to watch Pearl after Sal, and suspected she had deliberately given him the slip. She was like that, tended to go off on her own. The only one who might buck Quinn.
“She would have alerted us to that,” Quinn said. He glanced at his watch. “She’s been gone at least half an hour with no contact. It doesn’t make sense.”
“She’s not on the beach,” Sal said. “She’s supposed to tell us before she goes there.” Sal looked thoughtful. “Besides, her swimming suit is there in her room. Hanging over the shower rod in the bathroom and drying out.”
No one said anything for a long time. Fedderman had been the last one to see Pearl enter her room.
“Jesus!” Quinn finally said. “If—”
He was interrupted by the rasping of his cell phone. He wrested it from his pocket and looked at it, prepared to say Pearl’s name. But it wasn’t Pearl on the phone.
It was the Del Moray Police department.
“This is—”
“I know who you are,” Quinn said. “Is—”
“And I know who you are. At least I was told. Detective Frank Quinn from New York?”
“Yes. Listen—”
“I’m chief of police Alfonso Desoto, and my office was given this number to call by an anonymous source. A nutcase, we figured, until we went where the caller directed us.”
“Oh, Jesus!” Quinn said again, under his breath. “Where are you, Chief?”
“Number 7 Jacaranda, off of Main,” Desoto said. “It’s a green frame house with a lot of flowers out front. A trellis of roses near the driveway. About a block off the beach.”
“I’m on my way,” Quinn said.
“We’ll be waiting out back. You won’t have any trouble finding us. It’s the house with the woman’s body in the pool.”
The house on Jacaranda was just as Desoto had described, only he hadn’t mentioned the bees buzzing around the flowers out front. Fedderman made a wide detour to get to the backyard. Quinn took a straight line and was somehow unnoticed by the bees.
A uniformed Del Moray cop stood by a swimming pool with his arms crossed. An almost ridiculously handsome Latin man in a lightweight tailored suit stood near him, watching the two detectives approach. He had on a white shirt and blue tie, amazingly dry and unwrinkled by the heat. His shoes were two tones of tan with a high gloss.
Quinn nodded to the uniform, then to the clotheshorse.
“Quinn?” asked the clotheshorse.
Quinn introduced himself and Fedderman. The clotheshorse said he was Chief Desoto, and that the uniform’s name was Beckle.
Quinn wasn’t looking at either one of them. About five feet from where Beckle stood was what appeared to be Pearl’s beach bag. Beyond it, in the pool, floated a nude blond woman. She was facedown, and unmoving except with the slight play of water in the breeze.
As he swallowed his heart and moved toward the pool, Quinn saw that the beach bag was open. Pearl’s ID and Glock were visible.
Desoto clutched Quinn’s upper arm with surprising strength.
But it was something else that slowed Quinn. Something about the dead woman.
Beckle used a long hook pole to move the body closer to the edge of the pool. Quinn saw the expected cigarette burns and knife cuts. Then Beckle bent down and turned the dead woman’s head so Quinn could see her face.
The first thing he noticed was D.O.A. carved in her forehead.
The second thing was that she wasn’t Pearl.
Quinn let out a long breath. He realized he was sweating so that his clothes were soaked.
“You okay?” Desoto asked. “You know this Pearl?”
“It isn’t Pearl,” Quinn said. Not a religious man, he still felt like crossing himself. God must get a lot of that, he thought. Pleas for mercy . . . gushing gratitude. Or crushing depression.
Desoto looked at the beach bag, looked at Quinn. “We didn’t think so, but couldn’t be sure.”
“You can be sure now.”
“Then the unlucky one in the pool is the woman who goes with this address,” he said. “Audrey Simmons. Twenty-seven, single, lives—lived—alone.”
“Everything fits the victim profile,” Quinn said, glancing back at the pool.
Desoto nodded. “We know about the D.O.A. killer. Didn’t think he’d visit Del Moray, though. You’ve been tracking the bastard, and probably know more about him than we do.” He moved an arm of the well-cut suit to take in the pool with its floating corpse. A silver cuff link winked in the sun. “What you see is what we got. That and a few more nuggets of info on the victim.”
“I want it,” Quinn said. “Even if we already have it.”
Desoto cocked his head toward where a metal table with four webbed chairs sat beneath an oversized umbrella. The umbrella had fringe that the breeze occasionally ruffled.
“You’ve probably got more to tell me than I’ve got to tell you,” Desoto said. “Let’s sit there in the shade and have a talk.”
10
Desoto took it all in, and then informed Quinn that Audrey Simmons was divorced and a third-grade schoolteacher. She was a runner and took part in local marathons to raise money for charity. There was no obvious love interest in her life, but Desoto would learn more talking to friends and relatives of the victim.
“And of course,” he said, “we’ll keep each other informed about your detective, Pearl.”
“More than just a detective,” Quinn said.
“Ah. I thought so. From watching you at the pool.”
Desoto smiled with perfect white teeth. His thick black hair was undisturbed by the breeze, nailed down with some kind of greasy pomade, but on him it looked good. The guy really did resemble an old time matinee idol. He promised to keep Quinn informed of anything that might develop with the local investigation. That didn’t mean much to Quinn, who already knew who the killer was, and that he was staying on the move.
Where the hell is Pearl? He didn�
�t want to think she was with the killer. Or worse . . .
That isn’t how the bastard works. Isn’t part of his sick pattern.
But Quinn knew he was lying to himself. No one was completely predictable.
When Quinn returned to where the car was parked, his cell phone buzzed.
Sal growled, “Quinn?” in Quinn’s ear.
“Yeah.”
“The guy from the motel office said he got an anonymous phone call saying we should search Pearl’s room again.”
“Again means he was probably watching us the first time.”
“Creepy bastard might be watching now, or listening to our phone conversation. Anyway, we’re going back in and searching.”
“Not till I get there. I’m sitting in my car now.”
“You got any idea of why the killer wants Pearl’s room tossed again?”
“Not really,” Quinn said.
“We can handle it right now, in case it might be time urgent.”
“I want the Del Moray police in on this, assuming they’ve got a bomb squad.”
“Christ, a bomb! I never thought of that.”
“The killer might have.”
“A bomb . . . Well, I can see why you wouldn’t want to miss that.”
Quinn wondered for a moment if Sal was trying to be funny. He decided to let it pass. Probably Sal had been spending too much time with Harold.
“I’m on my way,” Quinn said.
He was thumbing out the Del Moray Police number on his cell as he pulled the big Lincoln away from the curb.
Quinn parked as close as possible to Pearl’s motel room. He saw Sal, Harold, and Fedderman standing outside in the shade of a palm tree, about a hundred feet from her door. They had strung yellow tape to keep gawkers a safe distance away. People stared, but most went on their way, either to the beach or leaving it. The motel manager, a tall, slender young man with huge tortoiseshell glasses, was on a sandy path just beyond them, pacing.