by John Lutz
Tanya was one of the first to board the train after the subway passengers exited. She found a seat near the back, where it would be easier to get out if the car became crowded as the train made its way downtown. As she settled in with her gym bag on her lap, the train jerked and squealed away. The motion caused her to glance to her left, and there was the man who’d been following her the past week or so.
Of course she wasn’t positive he’d been tailing her. At least not sure enough to confront him. Besides, she was used to men sort of latching on to her presence and paying her particular and obvious attention. Some of them were married men, or men too shy to speak to her. If they were on more or less the same schedule, these men would appear on her periphery often. Only now and then would one approach her. Tanya knew they meant no harm. And in truth she was flattered by their presence.
But there was something about this guy that didn’t fit the mold. He wasn’t feigning disinterest and then sneaking glances at her, like most of her anonymous admirers. Instead he either completely ignored her or stared right through her, as if he could see her in outline and transparent, like one of those airport scanners, but she was about as important to him as an inanimate object. There was something creepy about that stare.
Other than the unsettling stare, he was an average-looking sort of guy. He always had a hat of some sort on, and seldom wore the same one two days in a row. As if he thought that by changing hats he was altering his appearance and making himself unnoticeable. Today he had on a Milwaukee Brewers baseball cap. Tomorrow he might be wearing a beret. She did pick up that she saw him mostly on weekends, when she did much of her work because her clients were free from their offices. So maybe he had some other job during the week. It was, she thought, smiling slightly, at least nice to be attracting men who were employed.
Thank God the man didn’t look like Tom Stopp. Stopp was the man Tanya had mistakenly identified as her rapist ten years ago, not long after she’d moved to New York. Tanya had been at a club, drinking too much, with people she didn’t know, and she passed out. She had never done that before and was amazed. Then suspicious. She didn’t know whether someone had slipped a date-rape drug into her drink, or she’d simply not been used to so much alcohol in such a short period of time.
She had woken—or regained consciousness—the next morning with a man on top of her. She came alert and furious instantly, fought her way out from beneath him, and ran toward the door. Somehow she managed to snatch up her Levi’s and blouse as she ran, and in the elevator managed to yank and work her clothes onto her body. The physical action alerted her that she was sore where she shouldn’t have been. She immediately knew what had happened.
My God! Was he the only one?
She scrolled through her memory and found blank spots. Vaguely, she recalled the three men and two women, her “new friends” she’d been drinking with at Arthur’s Lounge on Sixth Avenue. Or was it Seventh? Her mind was playing tricks on her. Not natural.
A woman carrying a small brown dog got on the elevator when the door opened at lobby level. She’d looked at Tanya and said simply, “You’ve got no shoes, dear.” The elevator door slid closed and Tanya made her way toward the street door. She heard hurried footsteps on the stairs and assumed Tom Stopp was coming after her.
Tom Stopp. I do remember his name.
In the street, she waved her arms wildly and a cab separated itself from traffic and came toward her. At the same time, Stopp broke from the apartment door, saw her, and started yelling and running toward her.
She could see the cabbie yammering in his radio as the taxi pulled up next to her. She threw herself into the backseat and pulled the door shut.
Stopp was there immediately, tugging at the cab’s door handle.
“Doors, window, everything locked,” said the cabbie in an accent Tanya didn’t know.
Stopp started to beat on the window. For some reason the cabbie didn’t drive away. He simply sat calmly behind the steering wheel, only now and then glancing over to be sure Stopp’s efforts were in vain.
Then Tanya understood why the cab hadn’t driven away. A police cruiser was double-parked in front of it. Two uniformed policemen appeared on either side of Stopp and pulled him away from the cab. Tanya twisted around and saw that another police car was parked close behind the cab.
Stopp was out of sight now. The cab’s rear door opened, and one of the cops leaned in. “You okay, ma’am?”
Tanya was too confused to answer.
The cop looked at her more closely, smiled, then nodded. “Stay where you are for a little while, okay? Till we get this straightened out.”
She nodded. Stunned by what had happened. By what must have happened last night.
Tanya told her story to the police. So did Tom Stopp. He claimed to have been home all evening, alone, in an apartment other than the one from which Tanya had escaped. The apartment where Tanya had awakened was down the hall from Stopp’s. He’d heard a commotion, gone out into the hall, and seen Tanya fleeing. He went after her intending to help her.
The problem was that Stopp’s fingerprints were in the apartment where Tanya was raped. It was an unoccupied furnished apartment and he maintained that he’d gone into it a week ago to examine it because he was thinking about renting someplace larger. The super confirmed this, but so what? The bed was unmade, sheets a tangle, and it was obvious that the rape had occurred. If it wasn’t Stopp who’d drugged and attacked Tanya, where was the real rapist?
And who could substantiate that Stopp had been alone in his apartment, and not in the other that he’d known was vacant and had chosen as a convenient place to commit his crime?
Of course, Stopp’s insurmountable problem was that Tanya positively identified him as one of the men she’d been with earlier that night at the bar. One of the bartenders, though less certain, had also identified him. A sympathetic jury, an enthusiastic prosecutor, an inept defense attorney, and the evidence, all added up to a fifteen-to-twenty-year sentence for Tom Stopp.
That had all happened ten years ago, to a young and naïve Tanya Moody. She was older now, a self-supporting woman with a business of her own.
Tom Stopp was older, too. He was a forty-year-old ex-con who’d been exonerated by DNA evidence collected at the time of Tanya’s rape and stored for over a decade in an evidence box. He’d been released last year and was free.
Someone else had raped Tanya Moody, and he, too, was free somewhere.
The police had talked to Tanya about Stopp when he was released, and said he was living now in New Jersey and seemed to bear her no animosity. Also, he had alibis for at least two of the Skinner torture murders.
They warned Tanya to be careful, and to call them if she so much as caught a glimpse of Tom Stopp anywhere near her.
Only it wasn’t Stopp who’d been following her lately. And she doubted if the man was her actual rapist. He looked nothing like any of the men in the bar that night, and he would simply have no reason to step back into her life after ten years. He could rape some other woman with much less risk.
The Skinner murders, and the strange man she at least thought might be stalking her, had brought back to the top of her memory the time of the rape. She’d assumed that she’d purged herself of that night, or at least left it as a part of the past she had no need to revisit. But the man she kept glimpsing on the subway, and on the sidewalks, had become a regular visitor to her dreams.
Tanya owned a small .22-caliber handgun that she used to carry in her purse. She’d obtained it illegally as a gift from a man she’d dated after the trial, and for years it had lain wrapped in an oily rag in a steel lockbox at the back of her closet’s top shelf.
A week ago she’d gotten the gun down, checked it to make sure it was in working order, and again began carrying it. She knew it was against the law, but screw the Sullivan Act. When her life was at stake, the only law that mattered was survival. Tanya also had a tiny canister of mace in her purse, and she’d taken kickboxing less
ons. But she knew the kind of uphill struggle the strongest of women might have with the weakest of men. The gun gave her comfort.
She didn’t think she had enough evidence to contact the police about the man who seemed to be too often near her. And she didn’t know how they’d find the man to talk to him, unless they assigned an undercover cop to tag along with her for days until she could point him out. Obviously they weren’t going to do that. And after costing Tom Stopp years of his life, Tanya didn’t like the idea of positively identifying anyone for any reason. The human eye was an unreliable partner to memory.
All Tanya could do was wonder if the man actually was following her.
And, if so, why?
And be ready.
PART 3
We know the truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart.
—BLAISE PASCAL, Thoughts
I’ll make my Joy a secret thing,
My face shall wear a mask of care . . .
—WILLIAM HENRY DAVIES, “Hunting Joy”
67
By noon Quinn had pretty much given up on tracing the Skinner through the recorded purchase of a carpet-tucking knife. The search was further complicated when they learned that building supply stores sometimes sold such knives as part of a tool set.
The good piece of news was that Weaver was being released from the hospital. She wasn’t completely healed, but she was out of insurance and scheduled to become an outpatient. Aside from her mother in Pittsburgh, Weaver had a sister in Philadelphia who was a hospital administrator. Common sense and simple economics dictated that Weaver should spend the rest of her recuperation in Philadelphia.
Quinn picked up Weaver just before noon at the hospital and drove her by her apartment to pack, then to LaGuardia, where the good sister had reserved a seat on an American Airlines flight. He thought Weaver looked okay but still acted somewhat out of it. She kissed him on the mouth before she joined the security checkpoint line, and glanced back at him as she passed through the metal detector. Something about the glance suggested they would never see each other again.
All in all, her departure made Quinn feel like crap. Despite the hour, he used his cell phone to invite Jerry Lido to lunch. He knew what lunch was to Lido, and it was the kind of lunch Quinn felt like having today.
Quinn was supposed to meet Pearl for dinner before they went home to the brownstone. She sat alone at a diner table, sipping decaffeinated coffee that was catching up with her because she was on her third cup. Pearl figured three cups of decaf equaled about one cup of strong regular grind. Enough to keep her awake at night.
She knew Quinn had gone to lunch with Jerry Lido, and she knew what kind of lunch that could become.
Damn Quinn!
By the time she thought to check her cell phone, she felt as if she was swimming in coffee.
Uh-oh. Quinn had called and somehow she hadn’t heard the phone. He hadn’t left a voice message, but he’d called again and texted her. The text message mentioned his name, but after that made no sense whatsoever. Quinn hadn’t used his cell phone for that call. She knew it was because he barely knew how to send a text message. She saw that the call had been from Jerry Lido’s phone.
That explained a lot of things.
Pearl paid for the bottomless cup of coffee and went outside to hail a cab.
Pearl had to knock on Jerry Lido’s door for a long time. A woman with an odd brown hairdo that made her look like a spaniel opened a door across the hall and glared at Pearl. Pearl returned the glare. The woman shook her head and ducked back inside.
When Pearl looked back she saw that her knocking had been answered. The apartment door was open. Jerry Lido stood there wearing pants and the kind of sleeveless undershirt some people called a wife-beater. He was barefoot and smelled like gin. Behind him, across the living room, Quinn was snoring away on a sofa. He was dressed something like Lido but wearing a tangled tie. There was a Gilby’s bottle on a coffee table. Three more bottles on the floor. Pearl felt as if she’d disturbed two hibernating bears.
“I see you had a party today,” she said.
“More like a tête-à-tête,” Lido said, surprising Pearl with his vocabulary and elocution. Especially since he was obviously still drunk.
“Looks more like you two rolled down a hill.” She stepped inside and got another whiff of Lido’s breath. “Are you still drinking?”
Lido shrugged. “A little hair of the frog.”
“You mean dog. Frogs don’t have hair.”
“Nor do they bark.”
Pearl went across the room and stared down at Quinn. He looked as bad as Lido, but his chest was rising and falling regularly. At least he’d stopped snoring.
“We were working on the computer,” Lido said, as if in pathetic defense of his and Quinn’s conditions.
Pearl could have guessed that. Quinn had been doing his job of getting Lido to drink so he could get in touch with and apply his tech genius to the hunt for the Skinner. Pearl wondered if the afternoon had been productive. She winked at Lido. “So what’d you learn?”
He eagerly led her to a long table on which was a big desktop computer. A laptop was placed off to the side. There were two flat-screen monitors. One of them was blank. The other was showing that screen saver of what looked like PVC pipes that kept fitting together to form right angles unto eternity. That monitor came all the way to life when Lido sat down at the computer.
“We learned where carpet-tucking knives weren’t,” he said. “But when I was lying in bed, or on the floor, this evening, I thought of something else.”
“What was that?”
“The fusion of time and geography.”
“You’re still drunk,” Pearl said.
Lido gave the sheepish smile that made him look so human and pitiable. “A little, but not like him.” He pointed toward Quinn, who had shifted in his sleep and appeared about to fall off the sofa.
“We know the murders are committed on weekends,” Lido said. “Sometimes Mondays or Fridays. So what I figure is we can check New York hotel reservations around the times of the murders, maybe come up with the same name more than once.”
So simple, Pearl thought. Like all products of brilliance. For the first time she saw and appreciated Lido’s real genius on the computer. She could see why Quinn preferred him drunk when he worked.
Lido took a deep breath, like a concert pianist preparing to play. And he did play the keyboard like a musical instrument, roaming the Internet as if he invented it, pausing now and then to adjust something with the mouse as if finetuning or changing chords. There was no hesitancy, no altering of his strange body rhythm. His mind seemed to be one with the incredibly fast computer, somewhere out there in the ether, where Pearl couldn’t follow.
An hour passed like a minute. There was a thump as Quinn rolled off the sofa. Pearl looked over at him, momentarily concerned. He seemed none the worse for his short drop, and was sleeping deeply and probably comfortably, on the floor. Pearl turned back to her work (rather, Lido’s work) that Quinn should have been doing. Last night he’d followed Lido too far into the bottle. Pearl knew it wasn’t the first time. This crazy plan of his had to stop.
But not yet, Pearl thought. Lido was drunk anyway, so why not make use of him?
There were two matches, both men, who’d been at hotels in New York at the times of most of the Skinner murders. Pearl watched spellbound as Lido used the Internet to learn everything about them. She knew that half the sites he visited were confidential. They were breaking the law as certainly as if they were burglarizing buildings.
Not the first time, Pearl thought.
Finally Lido sat back from his computer. One of the men was a seventy-two-year-old financial consultant who lived with his wife in Atlanta. He traveled constantly, visiting clients all over the country. The other man was a clothing designer whose Internet history made it clear that he was gay.
“The gay guy maybe, but not likely,” Lido said, sitting back in his chair and
obviously disappointed. He appeared to be sobering up. Pearl, still haunted by strains of youthful Catholicism, absently crossed herself as she located a gin bottle and poured Lido a generous drink. Forgive me, for I know exactly what I do.
He tossed the gin down like water.
“Has there ever been a gay serial killer who murdered women?” he asked.
“Not to my knowledge.” Pearl poured herself a very small drink. “Not openly gay, anyway.”
Lido worked the computer some more. “Uh-oh.”
“What?”
“He’s not only gay, he’s married.”
“Well . . .”
“To another fella,” Lido said.
“Oh.”
“And when Verna Pound was killed he was in Paris.”
“Unless we have two killers, that leaves him out,” Pearl said. She took a sip of her drink.
Lido looked crestfallen, but only for a moment. Then he suddenly came back all the way alive. The gin kicking in. “How ’bout another drink?” he asked.
“Let’s work for a while, then I’ll pour you one,” Pearl said. Carrot and stick.
She felt terribly guilty to be using this guy. She felt no different from Quinn, who was over there sleeping on the carpet. She wanted to wring Quinn’s neck, but she also wanted to wring yet more tech miracles out of Jerry Lido.
“I’ve got an idea,” Pearl said. “Hotel reservations are one thing—if our killer even made reservations. They can be paid for in cash, or credit cards under different names. But if you travel alone and pay cash for an airline ticket, the authorities take note of you. And our killer wouldn’t take a chance and use anything but a valid credit card when it came to Homeland Security. Maybe we should get into credit card files, if you can.”
“Oh, I can,” Lido said. “But it’d be easier to check flights into New York carrying passengers traveling alone, and who paid cash or with credit or debit cards.”