by John Lutz
Rosa stood trembling, staring at the empty corridor. It had all been like a dream. Had she seen it? Had it actually happened?
She moved backward all the way into the storage room and, without thinking about it, resumed her work. She pushed the empty laundry cart out into the hall, bumping the door open, thinking of her mother and Sara in Mexico, of her forged papers and her job at the Antonian. Rosa was in charge of rooms 570 through 580 on the fifth floor. They were suites, and the tips were more than adequate. They were in dollars that soon became pesos.
She pushed the cart back along the corridor the way she’d come, listening to its squeaking rear wheel, telling herself that what she’d seen hadn’t happened. She couldn’t afford for it to have happened, so it hadn’t.
It hadn’t. She’d seen nothing, and she’d say nothing.
It hadn’t happened.
She silently repeated her daughter’s name to herself to the rhythm of the squeaking wheel, Sara, Sara, Sara…
It hadn’t.
33
Sal Vitali knew this was going to be one of his worst days.
“I wanted to look the place over before my company seriously considered leasing it,” Arnold Penington said. He gulped. “That’s when I found it. Her, I mean.”
It, Vitali thought, as he looked at what was left of the woman. She was hanging upside down from her bound ankles attached by rope to a beam, a long incision made from her pubis to her throat. She was opened up and hollowed out like Hettie Davis, only the long period of time had…Vitali, stared slack-mouthed at the dried, leathery state of her body. He could only think of it as cured meat.
The hardened mass on the concrete floor, beneath and alongside the woman’s upside-down head and gracefully draped arms, was what was left of her internal organs. Her eyes were missing-thanks to the rats that lived in the long-abandoned warehouse-and three of her fingers on the dried hand that lay partly on the concrete floor had been nibbled to bare bone.
Vitali heard the warehouse’s steel overhead door clatter and clank up, then lower. His partner, Harold Mishkin, he of the turbulent stomach, had just entered the warehouse after talking to the uniforms outside who’d secured the scene.
Vitali considered telling Mishkin not to look at the dead woman, then thought better of it. Mishkin took pride in the fact that he could screw his courage tight and look at what homicide detectives too often saw without losing his lunch. Occasionally his stomach had its way.
Arnold Penington had moved well back and stood silently, not looking in the direction of the dangling body. Mishkin continued to advance. He was about twenty feet away, waving at the dirty, narrow windows lining the east wall of the building. “We oughta get more light in here, Sal.”
“Maybe not, Harold,” Vitali said in his gravel-box voice.
Mishkin stopped cold and stared at what was left of the woman dangling upside down from the warehouse beam. His hand floated up to his mustached mouth.
Almost immediately he gained control of himself and pretended he’d raised his hand to stroke his mustache.
He said “Jesus, Sal.”
“Him and his dad,” Vitali, the lapsed Catholic, said. “I don’t see how they could let something like this happen.”
“Just like the other one,” Mishkin said. “Hettie Davis.”
Vitali could smell the menthol cream Mishkin always dabbed beneath his nostrils to help keep his food down at violent crime scenes.
“Gotta be the same guy,” Vitali said. “She’s been gutted and cleaned like some kinda game animal.”
“Yeah, but…what else happened to her? I mean, her eyes and all…”
“Rats,” Vitali said.
Mishkin turned away and bent over. He still didn’t lose it, though. He turned back, straightened up slowly as if in pain, and wiped his forearm across his mouth.
Vitali was proud of him. Mishkin should have been in another business, or riding a desk at some precinct house in a gentler part of town. It was where he’d be if he weren’t so damned good at his job.
Whatever the physical impact of what he saw, Mishkin’s mind was still working, along with his commitment to the job. He paced off a slow circle around the upside-down, dangling body. There was a floor drain nearby, down which most of her blood must have flowed. It was obvious, too, that her throat had been slashed, probably while she was alive and hanging there. The things people did…
“First Hettie Davis, now this one,” Vitali said. “We’ve got a set.”
“Judging by the condition of the body, this one was killed way before Davis,” Mishkin said.
“Yeah, but either way…”
“I know what you mean, Sal. We’ve got us a serial killer.” He finished his slow circle and wound up standing near Vitali. After another glance at the dead woman, he shivered. “What’s wrong with people, Sal?”
“Some people, you mean,” Vitali said.
“Yeah. Thank God only some.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with them, Harold. Maybe that’s why we do what we do, trying to figure it out.”
“That and we like to get paid,” Mishkin said, playing hard.
Sirens sounded outside.
“Reinforcements,” Mishkin said, figuring more radio cars and a crime scene unit. Maybe an ambulance. More than once somebody assumed to be dead turned out to be alive. It wouldn’t happen this time, though.
Neither Vitali nor Mishkin said anything for several minutes. Penington, even farther away now, remained silent. Then the steel overhead door at the other end of the warehouse rattled open again and let in a blast of bright light. Silhouetted against the afternoon brilliance, half a dozen figures entered the warehouse. Among them, Vitali recognized the short, chesty form of Dr. Julius Nift, the obnoxious little medical examiner.
“The little prick’s here,” Mishkin said.
“We’ve seen enough of the victim,” Vitali said. He nodded toward the advancing figures. “She belongs to them now.”
“No,” Mishkin said, “she belongs to us.”
34
Hobbs would kill her if he knew she was doing this, stopping for a drink at Melody’s on her way home from the doctor. But she felt she had the right to stop, to steady her nerves and to celebrate her relief.
Though Lavern Neeson hadn’t really expected a problem, she was nonetheless relieved. Her mammogram had turned out negative. Dr. Chivas hadn’t seemed to notice any injury to her internally bruised torso, which she had held as stiff and still as possible. She did sense that he’d noticed the makeup covering her facial bruises, but he didn’t say anything. There were all kinds of ways she might have gotten those marks, from a fall down the stairs to a quarrel with a neighbor. Anyway, Dr. Chivas wasn’t the sort who pried. If his patients wanted him to know something, they’d tell him. Then he would act. He would do what he could to heal.
Lavern had left the medical clinic and walked only a few blocks toward her subway stop before spotting Melody’s Lounge. She’d noticed it before, but had never gone inside. This afternoon, with something to drink to, and the city so hot, she did go in.
She was soon situated on a bar stool near the door. The lounge was dim, and there was a blues tune playing so you could barely hear it. Peggy Lee, one of her all-time favorite singers. There was a woman who’d overcome a rough youth, who’d had to cover her bruises with makeup. What a career Peggy Lee had enjoyed. What a life she’d led, after a stumbling start. Listening to her always made Lavern feel better.
Aside from a woman behind the bar, there were only three other people in Melody’s. A couple sat at one of the tables along the wall, lost in the promise of each other’s eyes. Halfway down the bar from Lavern a guy sat staring straight ahead maybe at himself, in the back bar mirror, sipping something amber from an on-the-rocks glass. There were two identical empty glasses in front of him.
Kind of early for that kind of drinking, Lavern thought. Though the way Peggy was slowly meting out the blues, it might have been a gloomy two
in the morning. The woman behind the bar, tall and with a top-bun hairdo that upped her to over six feet, approached and smiled a hello. Lavern ordered a Bloody Mary. Almost a health beverage.
Of course Hobbs would still object to it, as he objected to almost everything she did. He’d made her promise him she’d stop drinking, trying to get her to pretend along with him that she was developing a problem.
The tall woman-maybe Melody-had the drink before Lavern within a few minutes, then withdrew to the far end of the bar, where she’d been working on what looked like a crossword puzzle. Peggy Lee launched into a song warning her lover not to smoke in bed. Other than that it was quiet, with only soft traffic noises filtering in from outside.
Pleasant, Lavern thought. The alcohol relaxed her almost immediately, maybe because of the heat outside and the fact that she’d skipped lunch. She felt safe in here, isolated, her cell phone turned off and in the car, Hobbs at work for most of the rest of the day. She took a bite of the celery stalk that had been in her drink, then set it aside on a napkin. The crunching sound of her chewing the celery seemed unusually loud. Maybe it even attracted the attention of the guy down the bar.
He lowered his drink to its coaster and glanced over at her and smiled. Wham! This was a handsome one. In his thirties, dark hair and eyes, killer smile, wearing light tan slacks and a black sport coat, a red and black tie against a white shirt. Everything about him looked expensive.
Lavern thought about Hobbs.
He’d kill me.
If he knew.
She decided it wouldn’t hurt anything if she flirted a little. Hobbs would never find out. Anyway, she’d be in enough trouble with Hobbs if he just knew she was here, drinking in the middle of the day. He didn’t like it when he didn’t know exactly where she was, and he especially wouldn’t like it if he knew she was in a bar. Lounge, rather.
If she flirted a little, talked with this dark-haired guy and listened to his patter, it would make her feel better. Make her feel she was desirable as something other than a punching bag. She felt a pang of shame. A pang of anger. She smiled back at the man down the bar.
What the hell? It isn’t like I’m gonna screw the guy.
What Hobbs would do if he discovered her in bed with another man was something her mind didn’t want to comprehend.
In a kind of graceful manner the guy down the bar swiveled around on his stool and stood up, holding his drink steady and level in his right hand. She saw that he was about average height and well built beneath the nice clothes.
She liked the way he moved. He advanced toward her with a liquid, muscular walk, as if he might be some kind of athlete, absently spinning bar stools with his left hand with each step…two, three, five stools. They made a soft, ratchety whirring sound as they spun.
The closer he got, the handsomer he became. Heavy-lidded eyes, the kind people sometimes called bedroom eyes, a sort of predatory but sexy cast to his lean features.
When he was about six feet from her the expression on his face changed. Lavern knew why. He’d noticed the bruises. The makeup could conceal them somewhat in the soft light, but not from a few feet away. The light in his brown eyes dimmed, and his smile lost its wattage. He knew what facial bruises probably meant: violence he wanted no part of. Lavern came with dangerous baggage, so why waste time talking her up? Lavern couldn’t blame him.
When he was almost alongside her he widened his smile, raised his glass to her in a silent salute, then set it on the bar on his way out the door, as if he’d been headed there all the time and not down the bar to talk to her.
Letting me down easy.
“Too bad,” a woman’s voice said, as the door swung closed behind him, cutting off the glare of outside light. “I thought he was interested in you.”
Lavern looked up and saw the woman who might be Melody behind the bar.
“I thought so, too,” Lavern said. She took a sip of her Bloody Mary, then met Melody’s eyes with her own. “Listen, you don’t think I-”
“That you’re in here working? Drinking a Bloody Mary and trolling for afternoon clients?” Melody shook her head, grinning. “Not hardly. But I do think our handsome friend was lookin’ for a lady. He had that way about him.”
“Yeah, he sure did.”
“Oh, well. He’ll never know what he missed.”
“Shame,” Lavern said.
But the woman who might have been Melody was already moving away behind the bar, returning to concentrate on what might have been her crossword puzzle. Lavern was left feeling, as she often did, that this was a world in which she couldn’t quite connect.
It was strange, she thought, the way people’s lives could almost but not quite intersect, the way drastic changes could almost but not quite happen. She wondered if there were lots of parallel worlds where almost everything was different from the way it was in this one because different choices had been made. Different worlds with different, happy Laverns.
Not likely.
Fate, destiny, whatever. The hell with it.
Probably Hobbs would have found out and killed us both.
“Shame,” Lavern said again, softly, to herself.
35
Probably to demonstrate to Quinn that he was a busy man, Renz wanted to meet him for a chat while on the way to an appointment. He’d said he had something to show Quinn.
They stood in the warmth of the sun at Rockefeller Center, beneath the colorful line of noisily whipping flags that were captives to the breezes flowing down the avenue. Now and then one of the flags would snap like the canvas of a sailboat suddenly billowing with air. Behind them, Renz’s gleaming black limo sat at the curb, its engine idling, the barely discernable form of the driver behind the tinted windows sitting and staring patiently straight ahead.
Renz had on an expensive-looking blue pin-striped suit. His maroon tie had somehow found its way out from beneath his three-button coat and was frolicking in the breeze like the flags above. Backhanding the tie aside, he handed Quinn a large brown envelope and said nothing.
Obviously this was what he wanted to show Quinn, who undid the envelope’s clasped flap and examined the contents.
They were crime scene and morgue photos of Vera Doaks.
“What’s this world of ours come to?” Quinn said sadly.
“It’s the same as ever,” Renz said. “Story of life. We live, we become garbage, and they put us in a hole or burn us to ash.”
“Somehow you live with that perspective,” Quinn said.
“It’s the only way I can live, being honest. You should try it, Quinn, instead of nurturing your weak spot.”
“Which is?”
“You’re a romantic. The world is shit. You fool yourself into thinking it isn’t and try to clean it up while I recognize it for what it is and happily wallow in it. That’s the difference between us.”
“I’ll stay a romantic,” Quinn said.
Quinn knew what the photos meant, and there was no way to romanticize it. The killer the press had tabbed the Slicer had taken another victim. There was another serial killer in the city.
“On the surface it looks like we’re dealing with two dangerous psychos,” Renz said.
“On the surface?”
Quinn looked at the last photo and slid all of them back in the envelope. Then he reminded Renz of the common thread that seemed to connect the. 25-Caliber Killer’s victims. All of them had been hunters.
“And the two Slicer victims,” Renz said, showing that he was a step ahead of Quinn, “were treated like game animals, gutted and strung up like meat put out to cure. Could be we got us one killer using two different MOs to throw us off the scent.”
“Serial killers don’t usually work that way,” Quinn reminded Renz. “They act out of compulsion, and usually follow a ritual set in motion in childhood. These murders have all the earmarks of serial killer crimes, but it’s doubtful they were committed by the same person.”
“But possible.”
“B
arely.”
Renz attempted to tuck his errant tie back beneath his buttoned coat, but it flapped right back out, reminding him it was an untidy world. “In this case,” he said, ignoring the tie, “we’re going to assume, publicly at least, that we have one serial killer using two different methods.”
“And what links the murders is the hunting motif.”
“Very good,” Renz said.
“Flimsy.”
“But convenient. Sal Vitali and Harold Mishkin will continue working on the Slicer murders, but under your direction.”
“They won’t like that.”
Renz shrugged and made another futile attempt to tame his tie.
“Have you talked to Helen Iman about this?” Quinn asked. He was interested in what Helen the profiler had to say about tying the two cases together.
“She agrees with you,” Renz said. “It’s not likely the Slicer and the Twenty-five-Caliber Killer is the same person. Their methods aren’t even similar. She thinks the hunting angle is thin, too.”
“Helen’s smart for a profiler,” Quinn said. “You should listen to her.”
“But like you she considered it possible, if not probable, that we’ve got one killer. When we began discussing odds, though, she started talking about a meteor striking us dead.”
Quinn fixed a stare on Renz. “You don’t think it’s one killer either, do you, Harley?”
“I think it’s politically expedient for it to be one killer. You might not like the necessity of handling these cases that way, but there are politics involved. That’s something you should have realized earlier in your career, Quinn. You might have become police commissioner instead of me.”
Quinn knew he was right. Still…
“Have you told all this to Vitali and Mishkin?” Quinn asked.
“An hour ago,” Renz said.
“I’ll bet they were overjoyed.”
“They huffed and puffed, like you. But they took it. Like you. None of us has any real choice in this matter.”