by John Lutz
Her eyes were getting used to the dimness, and she made out folds of what looked like white plastic near her. The shower curtain! Nearby vertical tubular steel glinted dully to her left, and to her right. She recognized it and knew where she was-hanging upside down from her chinning bar that, along with its collapsible and portable supporting structure, had been moved from the exercise corner of her bedroom into the shower stall.
Dan! He did this! Must have planned it all along. Put something in my water bottle, something that made me sleep so he could do this. Oh, Jesus, I can pick them!
The pain in her head increased with the pressure of blood-swollen veins and began to pulse. She made another attempt to scream but could barely hear the muted hum that found its way through the tape.
Dear God, If I ever-
A scuffing, building rhythm came to her, moving closer.
Footsteps in the hall, near the open bathroom door.
The lights blinked on, blinding her.
21
Sometimes it made sense to go back to the beginning.
It occurred to Quinn that they’d carefully investigated the. 25-Caliber Killer murders that had happened on their watch, but the first two crimes, the murders of George Manders and Alan Weeks, had been given only slightly more than a cursory examination.
He decided to start with the first victim, George Manders.
Quinn and his team had studied the murder book on Manders, read the statements of neighbors, friends, and relatives, and looked into the life of Manders himself.
Manders seemed tailor-made to be an unlikely murder victim, a maddening conundrum for the police.
They’d found nothing in his life that might lead to his murder. But of course there must be something, because he had been murdered.
Quinn sat at Fedderman’s desk, where the light was brighter, and propped the rectangular half-frames of his reading glasses on the slightly crooked bridge of his nose. Patiently, and in a pedantic pose that didn’t suit him, he began to read.
The statements of people who knew Manders seemed to lead nowhere, and the revisited facts concerning his murder also yielded nothing new.
Manders had been a fairly successful hedge fund manager for a firm called Prudent Power, which specialized in shorting the market using exchange traded funds. Quinn could barely make himself read about that, so boring did it become. But he scanned it, learned something about puts and calls, then decided it probably had little to do with Manders’s murder except in larger and general ways whose understanding didn’t require an MBA from Harvard. He hoped.
He stood up, stretched, and then poured some of yesterday’s coffee into a white foam cup. Tasting the horrid stuff and making a face, he snatched up the Manders file from Fedderman’s desk, sat down at his own desk, and booted up his computer.
After a minute or so, and several acidic sips from the foam cup, he peered over the frames of his glasses at the glowing monitor. Where to look first but the Wall Street Journal?
Interesting. The price of Prudent Power had plunged as the market rose, losing a lot of value for its investors. But wasn’t that what a hedge fund was supposed to do, move the opposite way of the stock market? Quinn wasn’t sure. It might not be that simple, meaning the manager of Prudent Power might have made enemies by the thousands. It would take only one furious client crazy enough to kill him.
But would that same killer then have moved on to take more victims, people who, presumably, had nothing to do with his (her?) finances? And Quinn wondered, how many serial killers had there been who were wealthy enough to have holdings in hedge funds?
He phoned the police profiler, Helen Iman, and asked her that question.
“Maybe Jack the Ripper,” she said. “But we’ll never know for sure. That’s about it. Don’t bother barking up that tree, Quinn.”
He was holding the phone to his ear with his left hand while leafing through papers in the file.
“What’re you doing, Quinn?”
“Looking for another tree to bark up.”
“I’m pretty busy here,” Helen said.
“I’m leafing through witness statements as we talk,” he said. “Not that there were really any witnesses.”
“The usual friends and relatives talking about what a great guy the victim was, and how he had no enemies?”
“On target.”
“Read me who they are.”
Quinn found the statements list and began reading her the names of people either his team or the earlier investigators had interviewed.
“That last one,” Helen said, interrupting him. “Same last name as the victim.”
“Zoe Manders,” Quinn said. “Sister.”
“The name sounds familiar to me. She the one who’s the psychologist?”
“Says here she’s a psychoanalyst. Got an office over on Park Avenue.”
“La-di-da. Well, maybe that’s where I heard her name, some convention or other.”
“Manders himself was no pauper. Lived on East Fifty-sixth Street, near Sutton Place.”
“Prosperous siblings,” Helen said.
“Like you and I would be, if we were related and had money.”
“Talk to her again,” Helen said.
“Says here she and her brother only saw each other half a dozen times a year, mostly on holidays. Didn’t go to the same places or have the same friends. And sis is solid with alibi.”
“She might know something she doesn’t know she knows,” Helen said.
“That’s pretty goddamned cryptic.”
“How old is Dr. Manders?”
“Forty-six,” Quinn said, adjusting his reading glasses to peer more closely at the file.
“Victim was forty-three,” Helen said. “They probably grew up together and were close. She was his big sister, and now she’s a psychoanalyst. Most likely looked out for him when they were kids. She probably knows a lot about him.”
“And being a shrink, she’d know how to root through her childhood memories in productive fashion.”
“Exactly,” Helen said. “All you have to do is get her to think like a cop, and she might tell you something illuminating about little brother. Dr. Manders might be a hidden undeclared asset.”
Had Helen been reading the Wall Street Journal?
“One way to get to know something about the killer is to know his victims,” Quinn said.
“You got it, Quinn. Cherchez la shrink.”
“Always,” Quinn said.
Hettie’s almost constant muted screams were like insane musical accompaniment to her agony. While they were barely audible, she could hear them. Each one echoed in every dark corridor of her mind, each echo sharper and more painful than the last. Hettie had given up hope long ago.
What filled her mind now, along with the pain, was a question.
Why must it take so long to die?
22
Zoe Manders’s fashionable Park Avenue office address, just off Fifty-ninth Street, whispered success. Standing in the towering building’s glass and marble lobby, Quinn studied the directory and found that she was one of maybe a dozen doctors of one sort or another on the floors not occupied by corporations large and small. He walked over to where a uniformed security guard sat in a low chair behind a curved marble-topped counter and signed in. The marble was cold to the touch.
“Good to see you again, Captain.”
Quinn glanced again at the guard and recognized the grinning, puffy face of former NYPD detective Ben Byrd. Byrd had worked out of Manhattan South homicide and been in a bad car accident while on the way to a crime scene…what, five years ago?
“You’re looking good, Ben,” Quinn said, shaking hands. Quinn meant it. He’d heard about how seriously Byrd was injured, the endless rounds of operations.
Byrd added a shrug to his smile. “I don’t get around so well, but other than that there’s no pain. It’s pain that can wear you down, especially the back pain.”
Quinn caught a glint of polished steel b
ehind the counter and noticed for the first time that Byrd was seated in a wheelchair.
“I don’t get up outta here by myself,” Byrd said, but the grin didn’t waver. “I can get around okay, though. Things turned out all right, considering.”
“Better than what almost happened.”
“That’s what I tell myself, Captain.” Byrd’s gaze dropped to the building log on the marble counter. “I see you know Dr. Manders.”
“Meeting her for the first time,” Quinn said.
“Police business, I guess.”
“Yeah. Thanks for assuming I’m not one of her patients.”
“It wouldn’t be an insult. I was one of ’em myself, after the accident.”
“She must know her job,” Quinn said, a bit awkwardly.
“I figured you were here ’cause of what happened to her brother. That Twenty-five-Caliber thing. How’s it going on that one?”
“Slowly,” Quinn said.
“So nothing’s changed.”
Quinn told him nothing had, then offered his hand again to shake.
Byrd, with a still-powerful grip, gave Quinn’s hand a squeeze and said, “Take it easy on Dr. Manders. She’s one of the good ones.”
“In the building, you mean?”
“One of the good ones anywhere,” Byrd said. “A class lady.”
“Thanks for telling me.” Quinn smiled. “She’s not a suspect, Ben. Class ladies don’t shoot people in the head.”
“Most of them don’t,” Byrd said.
Quinn found the neatly disguised elevators and rode one to the ninth floor. At the end of a long, carpeted corridor, beyond the door to a law firm, was a plain wooden door simply lettered DR. ZOE MANDERS.
The door opened to a small anteroom that was tastefully furnished in grays and greens, with a brown leather sofa and two matching chairs. There were a lot of potted plants that looked artificial, but when Quinn touched one of the leaves he found it was real.
There was no receptionist and no place for one to sit and greet people. No phone in sight. The doctor must have an answering service. Next to a door beyond one of the brown leather chairs was a small illuminated button. Quinn had called ahead for an appointment, so he went over to the button and pressed it. A buzzer sounded behind the closed door.
Within a few seconds Dr. Zoe Manders opened the door and smiled at Quinn. She was a slim woman who looked too young to be in her forties, slightly taller than average, with brown eyes and short brown hair. Her features were even and radiated more health than delicacy. Maybe it was her wide cheekbones and wonderful smile, or maybe it was the fact that she was a psychoanalyst, that reminded Quinn of Ingrid Bergman, who’d played a psychiatrist in a Hitchcock movie.
“Detective Quinn?” she asked.
He’d been staring. “Yes, and you’re Dr. Manders?”
“The introductions are out of the way,” she said, still smiling, and stood aside so he could enter her office.
Simply being there made Quinn feel better, and he’d felt okay when he arrived. Gray and green in here, too, but with lighter tan leather. There were some heavy, shaded lamps with oversized bases on darkly grained wood tables, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in matching wood, the books neatly arranged. The carpet was a plush beige two shades darker than the leather chairs. The heavy drapes that muffled the sounds of Park Avenue traffic nine stories below were the deep, velvety green of old moss. On two of the walls were framed prints of Monet garden paintings, containing almost every color but in a muted harmony that made them relaxing to gaze on.
Dr. Manders was wearing loose-fitting charcoal-gray slacks, a silky pale gray blouse with a white pattern that made it look almost lacy, and low-heeled shoes of a gray that matched the blouse. She led Quinn to one of the comfortable-looking leather chairs and motioned for him to sit down, then she sat behind a polished wood desk that had delicately carved legs and looked more like a table. The effect of the room with her in it was strangely soothing. It was all calculated, Quinn told himself, but it certainly worked.
“You came about George,” she said. Her voice was unexpectedly low, also soothing.
At first Quinn didn’t understand, then realized he’d been thinking of the victim, her brother, by only his last name. “I did.”
“You’re not the first.”
“I know that, Dr. Manders. I mean I really came about George.”
She appeared puzzled.
“As opposed to his killer,” he said.
“You need to explain.”
“You know who I am? I mean, beyond my name and NYPD identity?”
She nodded. “I read the papers, watch TV news. When I heard the city had put you in charge of the investigation, I was glad. Not just because of George, but for the other victims. A serial killer…”
“The way we search for them,” Quinn said, “is figure out how they think, what passes for logic in their damaged minds. The more we can learn about them the better, even if it’s not directly related to the murders.”
“You mean you want my input as a psychoanalyst? I’m afraid you-”
“No, no,” he interrupted, leaning forward, realizing for the first time she was wearing perfume, something subtle that carried the scent of lilacs. “What I mean is that, the next best thing to knowing the killer is to know the victim. It might seem that these are random killings, but to the murderer, they’re not. Even if the killer thinks they are, they still might not be. The more I know about George, the more I can surmise about his killer. It’s even possible that I’ll be able to discern some sort of motive, even if your brother and his killer never crossed paths until the time of the murder.” He studied her impassive features. “Does that make sense, Dr. Manders?”
She locked gazes with him and nodded. “Very much sense. And it’s Zoe. We might as well be informal if I’m going to talk about George. It will make it easier for me.” Her dark eyes remained trained on his, searching, maybe imploring. He didn’t quite understand that. It came to him that there might be a lot about this woman that was beyond his understanding.
“All right, Zoe. If it’s okay with you, I’ll just sit back and you can tell me about your brother. Even the things that don’t seem important. I need to have some idea of him.”
She smiled. “Shouldn’t we change places?”
“No,” Quinn said seriously, “you’re in control here.”
“I sometimes wonder,” she said, and leaned back in her chair. Her eyes fixed on some point above Quinn’s head and behind him.
“I am-was-three years older than George,” she began. “We grew up in a middle-class neighborhood, but a kind of tough one. For a while, I was his protector. Not that he wouldn’t fight, but he was small for his age.”
“Was he a magnet for bullies?”
“No more than any kid small for his age. And bullies didn’t taunt him once they learned he was my little brother.”
“So you were pretty tough.”
She laughed. “No, just pretty. The boys wanted to stay on my good side.”
“Easy to see why.”
She ignored the compliment. “When I was sixteen and George was thirteen, our father died in an industrial accident.”
“What kind of accident?”
“Chemical,” she said. “He was a chemist, and someone at the plant where he worked for Montrose Insecticide and Feed used a wrong compound in a weed-killer, and it…killed my father. Our father.” She looked at Quinn, then back at the point above his head. What does she see there?
“Poisoned him?”
“The fumes destroyed his lungs. It was a terrible way to die.”
Tears glistened in her eyes. Quinn sat quietly, giving her time.
“When Dad died, it was as if a bomb had exploded in the family. Our mother raised us, never remarried. She had to work two jobs to keep the family going. Things changed between George and me. He became the protector. I became more of a…victim.”
Quinn listened patiently for well over an hour whil
e she went on to describe their home life, the pets they’d had, the arguments, how she and her brother had attended the same college, how George had an inborn skill with numbers, which carried him through business school. After working at a brokerage house he managed to attract investors and started a growth mutual fund, which evolved into a hedge fund, Prudent Power. Zoe meanwhile had gone on to postgraduate studies and earned her degree. She interned and worked for a while in a clinic, then as a corporate psychologist. Eight years ago she began her own practice.
“Obviously, you and George were both highly motivated.”
“I suppose so.” She smiled sadly. “To escape grief, perhaps.”
“Sounds as if things were hard for you.”
“Only to a degree. We were both good students, and we must have inherited ambition.”
“Strange thing for a psychoanalyst to say.”
“I suppose it is. But I think we both felt that things would work out okay for us.”
“Is your mother-”
“She died twelve years ago. A heart attack.”
“George never married?”
“He almost did, once. But the girl changed her mind.”
“What about his sister?”
She looked startled. Then she smiled, understanding he was talking about her. “I almost did once, too. Only I changed my mind.”
“George and you turned out to be overachievers.”
“That’d be my diagnosis,” she said.
“Because of your father’s death?”
“Maybe. He was an overachiever, too, as was his father.”
“In your genes.”
“Yeah, maybe. So much is genetic. Do you think murder is genetic, that it’s in your killer’s genes?”
“I honestly don’t know. That’d be your field.”
“Well, Detective Quinn-” She seemed suddenly surprised at herself. “I forgot to get your first name.”
“Just Quinn’ll work.”
“I thought we were on a first-name basis.”
“We are, Zoe. My given name’s Frank, but everyone calls me Quinn.”