by John Lutz
“I’m sure he is.” Westerley moved the mouse along a series of blue numerals on the screen and clicked on one. A brunette with bangs was performing fellatio, not on a vegetable. She did look like a minor, but it was impossible to be sure. “I’ll go look around, see if I can find Mathew. If I don’t, and he comes back here, tell him I want to talk to him.”
“I’ll do that. And thanks.” Edna shook her head. “He seems like such a normal young man.”
“He is,” Westerley said. “He’s curious, is all.”
“Then you don’t think it’s unusual for a boy—a young man—his age to visit these kinds of Internet sites?”
“It can’t be,” Westerley said. “Porn sites are the most visited places on the Internet.”
“The women in those photographs, at least some of them, must have parents, husbands, maybe children.”
“You left out money,” Westerley said.
Edna looked disgusted. “Some world it’s become.”
“Some world,” Westerley agreed.
73
Beth had used a brush to get around the edges of the porch floor with flat gray paint. That was the hard part, now that she was done with the scraping, and hammering in all the loose nails so they wouldn’t stick up from the floor.
The floor had become so weathered that bare wood was peeking through the paint leading up to the door, and beneath the glider where people rested their feet. All she had to do now was pour paint into a tray and roll the floor. It wouldn’t take very long, even though she’d be covering a large area.
She paused as she heard a car slow on the country road and turn into the driveway.
No, not a car—a truck. She could hear the rattling bass note of its big diesel engine.
As she watched, a gray, dusty truck cab parked near the short gravel jog to the house. It was one of the big rigs, with twin exhaust stacks protruding straight up on each side of the cab’s sleeper. On the tops of the exhaust-blackened stacks were loosely hinged caps that bounced and danced as the engine idled. Behind the cab were only the greasy fifthwheel connector plate, and air brake and electrical lines leading nowhere. No trailer, just the cab. There were numbers on the truck’s door, meaningless to Beth. She stood and watched, the paintbrush forgotten in her hand.
The truck’s door opened and Roy Brannigan swung down out of the cab.
Beth drew in her breath. Time seemed to collapse away beneath her, leaving her weightless and floating.
She and Roy hadn’t seen each other in years. Beth was surprised by how her ex-husband had broadened, though he wasn’t fat. More muscular, as if he worked out regularly in a gym. Or maybe driving, or loading and unloading trucks, had kept him in shape. She’d have known him at a glance, though, despite the buzz-cut hair and dark sunglasses.
He peeled off the tinted glasses and smiled at her, then took a few tentative steps toward the porch. He’d left the truck’s engine idling. It sounded like a great beast’s heartbeat, powerful, indestructible.
Beth walked to the top of the porch steps and stood looking at him. Somehow holding the brush gave her confidence, as if she might simply paint him out of her life again if he made trouble.
He moved a few steps closer so they could talk.
“Been a long while, Beth.”
She said nothing.
“I’m driving a truck now, doing long-distance hauling. My route on this run took me close to where I knew you lived, so I thought I’d drop by and see how you were doing.”
“I’m doing fine, Roy.”
“Me, too, I guess.”
“Eddie’s fine, too.”
At first he didn’t seem to recognize the name. Then he said, “Good. I was gonna ask.”
Sure you were.
“You look real good,” Roy said, as if at a loss for words. He moved his scuffed black leather boots around on the gravel. “Look, Beth, I just wanted to let you know I was sorry about everything. What I did . . . how it happened . . . I upped and left you because of my religion.”
“You still got religion, Roy?”
“I do, but you might say it’s less severe. I mean, what I’m trying to say is, I wised up, like everybody does when time passes. I apologize for overreacting. You know, back when . . . it happened.”
Beth chewed on her lower lip for a while, listening to the low, diesel beat of the truck. She didn’t like this, Roy showing up this way out of nowhere.
“I’ve got a husband, Roy,” she said.
He smiled. “I know you do. I checked on you. Fella in town mentioned Link’s away on a trip someplace. That his name, Link?”
Mentioned it because you asked about him. “You know his name.” Beth was beginning to feel the first cold touch of fear. “What is it you want, Roy?”
“It ain’t to dig up the past. Except I would like to know that you at least sort of forgive me—no, not even forgive. I guess I’d like you to understand that I was more rigid in my thinking back then. Now I can’t believe God would’ve approved of my actions. I’ve apologized to Him, and now I wanna apologize to you. I had no right to act like I did. I’m truly sorry.”
She studied him. He did seem sincere. “All right, Roy. I can’t forgive you, but I do understand.” She wondered if there might be some way she could get into the house if he tried anything, hold him off long enough to phone Wayne Westerley. But, hell, Wayne was all the way over in Hogart. It’d take him just inside an hour to get here.
“I heard about Vincent Salas being released,” Roy said. “Has that been making you uneasy in any way?”
“Not really,” Beth lied.
“I’d be glad to go talk to him if you want.”
“He wouldn’t like that.”
“You can’t know for sure. His soul might need succor if not salvation.”
“I’d prefer it if you’d just let all that drop, Roy. Let the past stay the past.”
Roy seemed to think that over. “Okay, Beth, if that’s what you want. But I got one question.” Roy moved a few steps closer. “Even though things worked out the way they did, is it possible we could be friends?”
Beth got a firmer grip on the paintbrush handle. “I don’t think I want that, Roy. I don’t go around thinking ill of you every day, and I can’t see where it does anybody any good to call up bad memories, or even good ones if they attach themselves to the bad. I’ve got a new life, and it looks like you do. Let’s leave it that way.”
Another step closer. “You sure that’s what you want?” He squared his new, overpowering body to hers and leaned toward her.
Gravel crunched out near where the truck cab was parked, and Eileen Millvany, who lived with her mother two houses up the road, slowed her SUV and glanced over at Beth, then drove on.
Roy and his truck had been seen, and Roy knew it. That made Beth feel better, safer.
“I’m sure and I’ll stay sure,” she said.
Roy stood and stared at her, a kind of quizzical expression on his face, and then he nodded, turned around, and walked slowly toward his truck. The confused expression was one she’d never seen before. She remembered him being certain of everything when they were together. The younger Roy thought he knew all the answers before he’d even heard the questions.
He climbed back up into the cab, shifted gears, and the truck rumbled away. Nothing was left of it but a thin haze of dust and a final dying growl from the direction of the county road.
Beth tried to make herself believe Roy’s appearance was something other than an illusion. It was so strange and unexpected, him suddenly turning up here like that.
She looked down at the brush in her hand and saw that the paint on it had become tacky and the bristles were stuck together. It needed to be placed in the jar of turpentine, and then she could continue with what she’d been doing and roll the porch’s paint-starved plank floor.
But not immediately.
She propped the brush in the turpentine jar and went inside the house.
She needed to make a
phone call.
74
New York, the present
“At least a couple of days,” Dr. Julius Nift said. “That’s why it smells the way it does in here. But I’ve got other ways to tell: lividity, putrefaction in relation to ambient temperature—”
“All right, all right,” Quinn said. He was the one who’d asked Nift how long the woman had been dead.
“Of course I’ll be able to give you a more accurate estimate when I get her laid out at—”
“I know, I know,” Quinn interrupted.
Pearl was standing dangerously close to Nift, looking down over his shoulder at Tanya Moody’s corpse. Quinn caught her eye and gave her what he hoped was a cautionary look. Even in the initial stage of decomposition, it was obvious that Tanya Moody had been a gorgeous woman. Nift was almost sure to say something that might set off Pearl.
The CSU techs were busy in the front of the stylish but economically furnished apartment. There was a lot of polished wood and black vinyl. Tanya’s dark tangle of hair seemed in some grisly way to go with the décor. She was nude, what had once been her lovely body marked by cigarette burns and intricate carving. Her gaping mouth was stopped with dried blood. A wad of material, probably her panties, that had been used to gag her, lay near her left shoulder. There was a lot of blood on the floor. The look on Tanya Moody’s face suggested she’d died in unimaginable pain.
Quinn caught the slightest acrid whiff of ammonia. He leaned forward to confirm it was coming from the wadded panties and not from the contents of her voided bladder.
Nift had been watching him. “Very good, detective. That isn’t the smell of urine. The killer must have brought Tanya back from merciful unconsciousness by applying a few drops of ammonia on the wadded panties in her mouth. She’d have to breathe in the fumes through her nose. A very effective method.”
“Can you close her eyes?” Quinn asked.
“Why? She can’t see one way or the other.”
“Close her eyes,” Quinn said.
Nift stopped probing and poking with his instruments and deftly closed the dead woman’s eyes.
“Who found her?” Quinn asked.
A very tall uniformed cop standing just inside the bedroom door said, “A woman who lives across the street had an appointment at her place with the dead woman. Tanya never showed up, so she came over to see why not. When nobody answered her knock, she noticed the smell and called the super. They phoned, knocked, got no answer. Then the super used his key, and they found what you see on the floor. That’s when they called us.”
“What kind of appointment?” Pearl asked.
“Physical workout routine. The dead woman was a personal trainer. She made house calls, and also sold her clients home exercise equipment.”
“I thought she might be some kind of athlete,” Nift said, “with those legs.”
“Where are the woman and super who found the body?” Quinn asked the uniformed cop, with a glance at Pearl.
“Super’s in his basement apartment. Dianne Cross, the one who was supposed to get the training, is down in the lobby. My partner’s finishing up talking to her.”
Quinn looked down at Nift. “What about Tanya Moody’s tongue?”
“I probed,” Nift said. “Preliminary finding is that it’s been severed and is missing.”
“May the bastard burn in hell,” the tall cop said, to no one in particular.
Pearl said, “Amen.”
“Can you turn her over?” Quinn asked.
“She won’t object,” Nift said. He carefully rotated the body, disturbing as little around it as possible. Rigor mortis had come and gone, so posed no problem. There were circular burns and complicated carvings on the victim’s back, too. Her wrists were taped behind her, and where her fingers had rested near the small of her back was something she might have attempted to write in her own blood. The blood marks looked to Quinn as if they might mean nothing other than a doomed woman wriggling her fingers. Or the marks might spell out the letters T and S.
Quinn called Pearl over and pointed out the marks. They both stooped and looked more closely.
“What’s that look like to you?” Quinn asked.
“I’m not sure,” Pearl said.
“If I can join the Rorschach test,” Nift said, “that looks like TS. A dying message.”
“If she scribbled it behind her back,” Pearl said, “she might have written the letters backward and meant ST.”
“Then the S would be backward,” Quinn said.
“Maybe,” Pearl conceded.
Nift said, “I already checked the bathroom mirror. There’s nothing written on it, or on any of the other mirrors.”
“Playing detective again,” Quinn said.
“Somebody’s got to.” Nift probed a flaccid breast with some kind of silver instrument. When its point broke the skin, Quinn had to look away. He heard Pearl’s sharp intake of breath.
“It was no worse than her flu shot,” Nift said, amused. “A mere prick.”
“You’re the biggest prick around here,” Pearl said, “even if you’re not the sharpest.”
Nift looked at her seriously. “Have you had your flu shot?”
“Have you had your kick in the balls?” Pearl asked.
That was when Vitali and Mishkin arrived. Sal was his usual stubby and harried self, given to bursts of gravelvoiced comments and abrupt movement. Mishkin was quiet and looked slightly ill. The mentholated cream he used at homicide scenes lay glossy on his bushy mustache. Just standing near Harold could clear your sinuses.
Quinn instructed Pearl to fill in both detectives while he went downstairs to the lobby to talk with Dianne Cross.
He was on the elevator when his memory lit up. TS. He checked the tattered list he kept folded in his wallet and found that he was right. Those were the initials of Tom Stopp, the man who’d been released on DNA evidence after serving a prison term because of Tanya Moody’s inaccurate identification.
Quinn wondered if Tom Stopp had an alibi for the time of Tanya Moody’s death.
Can it really be as simple as this? The victim scrawls her murderer’s initials with her own blood?
There would be ways to find out soon enough. They would find Stopp and lean on him hard. The truth would be in how he’d react, in what could be read in his eyes. Soon they would know if the awkwardly scrawled blood letters took their form coincidentally, or meant nothing at all.
Tom Stopp had an alibi, all right. Early the evening of Tanya Moody’s murder, he’d been rushed to the hospital after suffering a heart attack. Surgery had been performed. He was still confined to bed.
“The elephant sat on my chest,” he said, when Quinn visited him in his room at the Truman Rehabilitation Center. He grinned up from his bed. “That’s what we heart attack survivors say.”
“Have they found the problem?” Quinn asked.
Stopp nodded. “A weak left ventricle. They tried to fix it with drugs, but that didn’t work, so they put in a little thingy that’ll give it a jolt of electricity if it stops beating regular. That’s what I think they said, anyway. I was still kinda groggy with whatever they gave me to put me out.”
“I was you, I’d find out for sure,” Quinn said.
“Believe me, I will.” He stared up at Quinn. “You’re here about Tanya Moody.”
“How’d you know?”
“I watch a lot of news.” His gaze flicked to a small television supported by a cocked steel elbow in a corner near the ceiling. “The world’s going all to hell.”
“Nothing new there,” Quinn said.
Stopp raised an arm with an IV tube attached to it. “Listen, aside from having a perfect alibi, I’d never do harm to that woman. What happened to her, I mean the rape, was shitty, but I never had anything to do with it. Shook up like she was, she made a wrong identification. I don’t hold it against her.”
“You must a little,” Quinn said.
“That’s what I’d be telling you if I was guilty of
killing her, trying to act the honest innocent. But the way I see it, serving time on a bad rap is just another example of the way my life’s been screwed up and plagued by bad luck from the beginning, when I was a breech-birth baby.”
“There are lives like that,” Quinn agreed.
“It’s almost enough to make you believe in astrology.”
“Well, your stars were aligned right for this one. Your life was being saved around the same time Tanya Moody was losing hers.”
“Her turn, I guess,” Stopp said. He seemed to get no satisfaction from the observation.
Quinn nodded good-bye and moved toward the door. He turned. “By the way, is Stopp your real name?”
Stopp seemed puzzled. “Whaddya mean?”
“I mean, is it short for something?”
“Craps, losing lottery numbers, second-best poker hands, horses that stumble coming out of the gate.”
“Really, what’s your full family name?”
“Lance Thomas Stopp. That’s it.”
“No kidding. Lance has got some pizzazz. Your mom shoulda gone with that one.”
“I dunno. For whatever reason, my mom and dad called me Tom, even when I was in diapers. The wrong name from the beginning. Maybe that’s why my life’s been all screwed up.”
“That kind of thing can happen,” Quinn said.
He wondered if Stopp had any brothers, and if so, what were their first initials.
“You got any siblings?” he asked Stopp.
“A brother Marvin out in California, and a sister Terri, is all. They don’t talk to me anymore. Maybe because I owe them more money than I can ever repay.”
Quinn asked himself if there could be so much self-pity in the room that it might be contagious. It was certainly suffocating.
“Take care of yourself,” he said, and left before the walls closed in on him.
“It’s way too late for that,” Stopp said behind him as the door closed.
The phone call scared the hell out of Sanderson the second he recognized the voice. The call came in over his cell phone while he was walking along Central Park West. Unknown Number, it said on his phone’s ID panel. And when he heard the voice he understood why.