by John Lutz
Westerley handed the receipt back to her. “New York’s a long way from Houston,” he said.
“So how’d this receipt get in Link’s pocket?”
“I don’t know. Far be it from me to defend your husband, but things like that sometimes happen for reasons we don’t imagine. I mean, maybe it’s a national chain restaurant with New York headquarters, so they print all their receipts with the New York address so customers will identify them with the city. Like with Nathan’s hot dogs. Or maybe the machine that printed the date was set wrong. Or maybe Link’s having a secret affair.”
“Do you really think that last one’s possible?”
Westerley smiled. “Should we of all people doubt the possibility?”
Beth crumpled the receipt and tossed it in a nearby wastebasket.
“I’ll go with the machine that’s set wrong,” she said.
“I’ll bet on somebody else’s old receipt, and Link picked it up with some other stuff and stuck it in his pocket.”
“Yeah, that’s a possibility, too.”
But they were both thinking the same thing.
Maybe, when the DNA results came in, it wouldn’t matter.
When Westerley got back to the office, Billy was hunched over the computer. The tip of his tongue was protruding from the corner of his mouth, where it always was when he was deep in concentration. Mathew Wellman was standing behind him, observing what Billy was doing. Mathew was smiling. He greeted Westerley with his usual politeness.
“Hi, Sheriff Westerley. Billy’s got a good feel for this.”
Westerley said, “I’m glad somebody in this department does.”
“This software the state supplied you with is ideal for data mining.”
“That’s what we do,” Westerley said, “mine data.”
“Seeking gold nuggets of evidence,” Billy said. “That’s neat.”
Westerley thought his deputy might be spending too much time with Mathew.
For a second Westerley wondered if Mathew could use this wonderful new software to hack into the lab’s system and see what there was to see about the tests on the DNA samples he’d sent them over two weeks ago.
But that would be illegal.
And he was the sheriff.
70
New York, the present
Quinn wasn’t surprised when he picked up his desk phone and found himself talking with Nancy Weaver in Philadelphia.
He was the first one in the office, as he often was, and he suspected she’d phoned at the early hour to talk to him when he was alone, before things got busy.
Her voice had changed, he noticed, gotten huskier, and she seemed to be forcing her words.
“The news I’m reading and seeing makes it seem you’re not making much progress,” she said.
He smiled. “You call to chew me out?”
“No. To thank you, more than anything. You looked after me. Then you got me off the treadmill where I was running faster and faster but didn’t realize it.”
“Now that you’ve slowed down,” Quinn said, “how are you doing?”
“I’m feeling better, but after the first whack on the back of my head, I don’t remember much of anything until I woke up in the hospital. I lie in bed every night and work on it until I go to sleep, but I don’t think I got a clear look at whoever attacked me. I can’t say for sure it was Sanderson.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore—not to you, Nancy. You’re out of this one, and out of anything else, until you get back to being yourself.”
“I’m enough like myself to view what’s happening at a distance. It still looks to me like you’ve gotta pull out all the stops until you nail this asshole.”
Quinn wondered whether the way she was mixing metaphors meant her mind still wasn’t functioning at full capacity. Or maybe he was falling into the trap of playing amateur psychologist. “We’re doing what we have to,” he said. “We’ll get him. You take care of yourself and let us worry about who gets nailed when the stops are pulled.”
“Huh? You okay, Quinn?”
He grinned. “Maybe I need time off more than you do.”
He heard the street door, then the office door open. Pearl had arrived.
“What’s going on there?” Weaver asked on the phone.
“Pearl just came in.”
“Tell her I said hello,” Weaver said, and hung up.
Good buddies, as long as they’re in different cities.
“Who was that?” Pearl asked, from where she was standing by the coffee machine.
“Weaver.”
“Her brain still Jell-O?”
“More or less.”
The street door made its clattering, pneumatic sound again. There were footfalls in the tile foyer, and then the office door flew open.
Quinn had expected to see Fedderman. Instead, Jerry Lido came bursting in. His khaki pants were amazingly wrinkled, his gray shirt was crookedly buttoned, and his tousled hair stuck out over his ears like wings.
Lido’s eyes were swollen and bloodshot from fatigue, but his skinny body throbbed with energy. He was grinning with every snaggletooth and his face seemed to be illuminated from inside like a Halloween jack-o’-lantern’s.
“I got something!” he almost shouted, his voice cracking as if he were a teenager grown too old for the choir.
“I hope to hell it isn’t catching,” Pearl said.
He aimed his glow of animated enthusiasm at her and then plopped heavily into her desk chair. “Pour me some coffee, Pearl.”
She looked at him as if he’d gone insane. “I’ve got some boiling hot in this cup. Tell me where you want me to pour it.”
Lido ignored her and turned his illuminated glassy stare toward Quinn. He sighed, as if he’d finally caught his breath. “I’ve got something,” he repeated, only slightly more calmly.
“What have you got other than delirium tremens?” Pearl asked.
Quinn glanced at her and held out a hand palm down, signaling for her to lay off Lido so they could find out why he was so excited. He knew Lido and was sure that if he was this ecstatic he must at least think he had good reason. Besides, Quinn was sure that Lido wasn’t drunk or hungover. Quinn recognized the symptoms. Lido was high on adrenaline while walking the jagged edge of exhaustion.
Lido beamed at both of them. “I worked the Internet all night, and I came up with a name.”
No one moved or said anything for several seconds.
“The name we’ve been looking for?” Pearl asked.
Lido placed a cupped hand on each kneecap and nodded. “The name we’ve got for sure.”
Pearl walked over to the brewer and poured him a cup of coffee.
Tanya Moody had overslept. Her first thought when she opened her eyes was that she shouldn’t have taken that extra sleeping pill last night to calm her nerves. Daylight was streaming into the bedroom. She’d left the drapes opened wide and the window raised, so she could get some breeze during the first cool night forecast in weeks.
Tanya’s second thought was that she was going to be late for work, and cascading behind that came the realization that something was wrong. She couldn’t move. She became aware that she was breathing through her nose, and that realization made it suddenly difficult to breathe.
She tried to explore with her tongue, but even that was constricted. Her mouth was stuffed with material of some sort. Silk? She probed with her tongue’s tip and found the backs of her teeth, managed to open her mouth slightly, and beyond the folds of material felt the tacky surface of . . . tape!
And the material jammed into her mouth was silk....
She knew immediately what was happening. The open window she’d thought was far enough from the fire escape hadn’t been far enough away at all.
She had a visitor.
Panic hit her as if she’d been Tasered. Her body vibrated and bucked, but she remained lying on her stomach, her wrists taped tightly behind her at the small of her back, her legs taped firmly together.
; Finally the panic passed. The terror remained.
For some reason she thought of mermaids. Mermaids have no legs, only a single tail that they can flop around helplessly when out of the water. But mermaids could at least speak. With her panties wadded into a mass in her mouth, and her lips sealed with duct tape, Tanya could make only a low humming sound.
“I’m glad you’re awake,” a man’s voice said.
She managed to swivel her head toward the sound, causing a sharp ache in her neck, as if she’d been jabbed with a needle. Outlined against the angled morning sunlight splashed on the white sheer curtains, she saw the dim silhouette of a man.
As he moved toward her she noticed something short and curved in his hand. She could tell by the way he was holding it—out away from his body and with respect—that it was a knife.
With an oddly delicate motion, he removed the thin sheet that was covering her.
Tanya was suddenly cold, and at the same time felt a spreading warm wetness beneath her as her bladder released. Until now, she had only thought she’d known fear.
He gently laid something over her head—the sheet—so that she couldn’t see what was coming. She knew that he wanted each singular agony to be a surprise.
Two, three drops of liquid fell onto the sheet, and she smelled the acrid scent of ammonia. Then came a sound she recognized—the ratchet catch of a cigarette lighter—and another scent she knew. He’d lit a cigarette.
If there had been any doubt as to who had her, there was none now.
Tanya began to scream, over and over, sounding very much like a desperate bee trapped in a tightly sealed jar.
There was only one person close enough to hear her, and he wasn’t going to help.
71
“So here’s what I learned,” Lido said, standing up from where he’d been seated in Pearl’s chair.
Fedderman had come in. He stopped and stood still in obedience to Quinn’s hand signal. The Q and A detectives were all there except for Vitali and Mishkin, who were still touching final bases in their fruitless search for the source of the killer’s carpet-tucking knife.
Lido, drunk for a change on adrenaline rather than alcohol, began to pace as he spoke, three steps, then a quick turn, like a dance step, and three steps back. “I sifted through travel matches that occurred on or near the dates of the murders,” he said. “Concentrated on male passengers between twenty-five and fifty years old and traveling alone.”
“All this on the Internet?” Fedderman asked.
Lido glanced at him but didn’t bother to answer. Quinn gave Fedderman a nod.
“Whaddya think, Feds?” Pearl said. “He was running around in Nikes?”
Lido ignored them all and continued: “This turned up a possibility. A passenger named Lincoln Evans flew from Kansas City, Missouri, into Hartford, Connecticut, on two occasions in the past three months. Hartford is only ninetytwo miles from New York City. Both times the going and return flights bracketed Skinner murders, and both flights had layovers in St. Louis. Both times Evans paid cash for his ticket, and both times the airline made a note of his address for their database and for Homeland Security. Evans lives, or lived, in the small town of Edmundsville, Missouri.”
Lido stood still and looked at them, as if expecting a reaction.
“Seems kind of spare,” Pearl said.
“You don’t get it yet?”
“No.”
Lido grinned. “Only because I’m not finished.”
Here was something Quinn hadn’t seen in Lido—a flair for the dramatic. Probably a hopeful sign.
“I then went to work via the Internet”—Lido glanced at Fedderman—“on the car-rental agencies.”
Quinn knew these were mostly questionable databases. He hoped no one would ask Lido about the legality of his Net searches. And how those searches would be used as evidence in court. Quinn was already thinking about how to put the monkey of illegal searches on Renz’s back, where he could be sure methodology would never get in the way of results—or political glory.
“On both Hartford occasions,” Lido said, “Lincoln Evans rented a Budget midsized car, paying cash and using his driver’s license as identification. I managed to check deeper into the rental records.”
“Hacked into them?” Fedderman asked.
“I don’t like that term,” Lido said, and ignored Fedderman. “Car-rental agencies keep scrupulous mileage records. Both times, Evans drove far enough to have visited New York City and then return to Hartford.”
Lido sat back down in Pearl’s chair and looked around, grinning in exhausted triumph.
Pearl returned his grin. “Now I do get it. Our killer’s covering his tracks by not making any. He flies into nearby cities and then drives into New York.”
“His killing ground,” Fedderman said.
“And later he leaves New York the same way. I’m not finished checking other cities,” Lido said, “but it’ll be easier, now that we have a name.”
“Lincoln Evans,” Pearl said, as if the vowels left a bad taste.
“Great work!” Quinn said. And it was that, all right. Quinn knew that at the same time it might mean nothing other than that within the time frames of two of the Skinner murders, the same man, meeting their narrow criteria, visited a city within easy driving distance of New York. Maybe he was a business traveler with clients in Hartford and New York. Maybe he paid cash because he was a wise spender who didn’t believe in credit. Maybe his credit had been revoked. Maybe he was a serial murderer trying to cover his tracks on the way to and from his kill zone.
Though what they had wasn’t that much in and of itself, in the context of building a case, the information was specific.
Pearl was leaning a shoulder into the wall, obviously pleased by Lido’s jittery but cogent presentation.
Fedderman was still standing stock still, working out in his mind what it all might mean.
The office had slipped into an anticlimactic torpor.
Quinn looked at Lido. “You had breakfast?”
Lido shook his head no. “Too busy to eat.”
And too excited, Quinn thought. This was a major achievement for Lido. The discredited, ostracized alcoholic had come through with what might be the name of the killer. He had something to build on. But right now, Lido needed for his pulse rate to be brought down a few notches.
Quinn knew Lido must have done most of his work fueled on whatever was available to drink. This didn’t seem the time to mention that.
Lido must have known what Quinn was thinking, because he smiled guiltily and shrugged.
“Time for real food,” Quinn said. “Eggs, toast, sausages.”
Lido knew that tone in Quinn’s voice. It left no room for argument. He stood up out of Pearl’s chair. “Okay, and some coffee.”
“Decaf,” Quinn said.
He was pleased to see Pearl smiling as they went out the door.
72
Edmundsville, the present
Edna Wellman was distraught when she phoned the sheriff’s office, so Billy Noth passed the phone to Westerley. The sheriff and Edna’s husband Joe had been hunting buddies before Joe’s fatal heart attack five years ago.
“It’s about my nephew Mathew,” Edna said in a voice made soprano by . . . what, disbelief? Anger?
“He and I have met,” Westerley said calmly, trying to slow down Edna. “He seems like a nice kid.”
“Well, you wouldn’t think so if . . .”
“If what?” Westerley wanted to get this call out of the way and tend to more important business, like surveying the week’s traffic citations and felony statistics.
“If you come over here, I think you could better understand the problem.”
Westerley sighed, hoping Edna hadn’t heard. “Okay, Edna, I’ll be right there.”
The Wellman house, a 1970s brick ranch with two-car garage, was only three blocks from Westerley’s office, on a tree-lined cross street of similar houses. Edna was waiting for him with the
door open.
She was in her early fifties now, and had put on a lot of weight since Joe’s death. Her pretty, flesh-padded face was lined with concern. “Thanks for coming, Sheriff.”
Not Wayne. A professional call.
“Somebody try to break in?” Westerley asked. There’d been a few house burglaries in the area over the past six months.
“Worse,” Edna said.
She led Westerley to a small den where Joe used to go to smoke his cigars. The room hadn’t changed much, except now there was a computer with a large monitor on the old maple desk.
On the monitor was a hefty blond woman having sex with a cucumber. Though he didn’t know quite why, Westerley was glad to see that the cucumber was wearing a condom.
“This is mild,” Edna Wellman proclaimed, looking away from Westerley and the image on the monitor, “compared to some of the other sites Mathew has been visiting.”
Westerley coughed. “Well . . .”
“Isn’t this kind of thing illegal?” Edna asked.
“It is if there are minors involved.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are, on some of the sites.”
“You’ve looked at other sites he’s visited?”
“Yes, I thought I had to know what I was talking about, if I was going to confront Mathew.”
“Good point. He’s no dummy.”
“I swear, Wayne, you wouldn’t believe some of what goes on that a ten-year-old could visit if he swore he was twentyone. There are safeguards to screen out minors, but there are also mere children who know more about computers than the people who designed the safeguards.”
“Sometimes the people who produce this stuff use models who are of age but look a lot younger,” Westerley said. He looked again at the woman on the screen. She didn’t seem to be enjoying herself. “Mathew’s what, twenty-two?”
“Just.”
Westerley shrugged. “He’s an adult, too.”
Edna Wellman stared at him. “So what can we do, Wayne?”
“Where’s Mathew now?”
“He left right after I walked in and found him looking at this filth. He’s embarrassed, no doubt. He should be.”