John Lutz Bundle (143 page)

Sal Vitali sat at his desk in the almost-deserted squad room. All was quiet, except for a printer industriously buzzing away somewhere and an occasional muffled shout from the holding cells upstairs. Most of the detectives were out in the field. Only Don Mackey, a dogged old cop nearing retirement, was at his desk over near the window, working the phone.

Sal’s partner, Mishkin, sat across from him. They’d cleared off most of the desktop, and on it, scattered over a pristine white sheet of printer paper, were the items the crime scene unit had vacuumed up from the Antonian Hotel corridor where Floyd Becker had been shot and killed before his body was dragged outside. There was lint, a bit of brown plastic that had come off the end of a shoelace (not Becker’s, and probably not his killer’s), lint, three human hairs, and more lint. None of the hairs was the victim’s, but that didn’t mean the killer’s hair was there. The hairs could have come from anyone passing along the corridor.

Sal had read somewhere that the average person lost approximately eighty individual hairs per day. On most people that hair grew back, but on Sal’s head, he wasn’t so sure. It seemed to him that he left at least eighty hairs in the drain every morning when he showered. But maybe that was because he had so much of the stuff to begin with. The other detectives in the precinct kidded him sometimes about his hair, called him Columbo. Sal bore up under it and pretended to be annoyed. Like he had a choice.

Quinn might not approve of him examining the vacuum bag items, believing the Slicer and his gutted dead women, not .25-Caliber Killer victims, were Sal and Mishkin’s bailiwick, but so what? This was supposed to be one case, with one psycho killer, so in Sal’s view it was one big bag of shit.

What Sal really wanted to do was break both cases, collar two killers, show the bastards in the puzzle palace they were overthinking this thing. Renz and Helen the profiler figured there was one killer with two distinctly different MOs, who killed women one way and men another. Sal didn’t see it as likely. They all must have fallen under the spell of Helen the profiler, who as far as Sal was concerned might be a female impersonator, with that lanky body, those long bony fingers, and that chin. Not a bad-looking one, though. Some of those transgenders could fool you.

“Nothing we might be able to use but the hair, Sal,” Mishkin said, squinting down at the sparse assortment on the desktop. “And not even that unless we get a match.”

“The little plastic doodad from the end of a shoelace,” Sal said.

“If that’s what it is,” Mishkin said.

“Lab says that’s what it is.”

“Then when we get a suspect, we look close at his shoelaces. Especially if they’re brown.”

“And his hair,” Sal said.

Mishkin sat back and wiped his hand down his face, then smoothed out his mustache as if it needed it. “That break-in at Quinn and his team’s office, Sal—you think it’s connected to any of this?”

“Doubt it,” Sal said. “Probably just some asshole looking for money to score some dope. Probably didn’t even know the place was a cop shop.”

“The guy did a neat job picking the lock.”

“Smart asshole. Or maybe somebody forgot to lock the door when they left, and the guy walked right in.”

“Happens,” Mishkin said.

Very carefully, using tweezers, Sal picked up each item from the vacuuming and placed it back in its plastic evidence bag.

“Happens,” he agreed, when he was finished.

“There were three hairs, right?” Mishkin said.

Sal looked at him. “Right.”

“Just wanted to make sure,” Mishkin said. “Wouldn’t want one of your many hairs to get in with them.”

Sal kept looking at him, wondering if he’d just been ragged, but Mishkin was wearing his usual bland and amiable expression.

“You want some coffee, Sal?”

“Sure.”

You never could tell with Mishkin.

The man who’d broken into the Seventy-ninth Street office and knocked out Quinn sat at an inside table in the Aces Up diner on Amsterdam, sipping cold green tea and watching people and traffic stream past outside. Twin parallel lines of concern were etched vertically above the bridge of his nose. He was still unhappy about how his plan to become the hunter rather than the hunted had turned out.

The break-in had been easy enough. He smiled at the thought of it. How ironic that the police would take over office space and not concern themselves with the quality of the lock on the door. That was exactly how bureaucracies worked. Or didn’t work. With a good set of picks in expert hands, the lock had yielded after only a few minutes.

The plan had been to enter and obtain information, then leave without any indication that he’d been there. He would then know what Quinn knew, and Quinn would be unaware of it. That might make the game somewhat less interesting, but definitely safer.

A waiter came and placed the tuna salad sandwich he’d ordered on the table before him, then topped off his iced tea.

He
had
been hungry, and as he replenished his body with food and energy, optimism gradually replaced his concern. Last night—or early this morning—might have gone a lot worse. The suddenness of Quinn’s entrance and discovery of an intruder had surprised both of them. And in the ensuing struggle to escape, he had injured Quinn, given him something to think about other than his hunt.

Quinn wasn’t a young man, but there was an obvious strength in him, and he knew how to fight, so it was lucky that he hadn’t had time to set himself for the intruder’s attack. The game might have ended right there. As it was, the break-in had been partially successful in that it might have thrown Quinn and his detectives off their game.

He took a sip of tea.

Yes, it could have been worse.

Now Quinn would walk with the added dimension of fear, the cold tingle up the spine that came with the realization that stalker might at any moment become stalked. The intruder smiled. He’d been in that position and knew how it felt. It seemed to turn the world upside down.

Not that it would keep Quinn subdued for long. He’d know how to handle fear. He was an old hand at his game, a seasoned hunter.

But now he was a hunter who would occasionally glance back over his shoulder.

What was that legendary baseball pitcher’s adage?
Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.

One day Quinn might look back too late, and there would be what had been gaining on him, suddenly caught up.

Quinn was breathing heavily with the effort of keeping his weight off Zoe as he rolled from on top of her and onto his cool side of the bed. He blew out a breath toward the ceiling, then turned his head to the side to look across his pillow at her.

Zoe was still on her back, one of her bare legs gracefully bent at the knee. Her nude body was glistening with perspiration. She and Quinn were both sweating, but the ceiling fan was on and would soon cool their bodies. The fan made a barely discernable
tick, tick, tick
as the broad wicker blades rotated, as if to punctuate the room’s isolation from the outside world.

Zoe noticed he was staring at her, and looked back at him with a kind of dreamy expression in her half-closed eyes.

“You okay?” Quinn asked.

“Men ask that a lot.”

“How do you know?”

“My patients. I know a lot of secrets.”

Quinn stared up at the ceiling, thinking about his visit with Alfred Beeker.

Tick, tick, tick…

“I am,” Zoe said.

“Huh?”

“Okay. Better than okay.” She reached over and gently touched his arm. “What are you thinking?”

“Women ask that a lot,” Quinn said.

“Do men ever answer honestly?”

“Sometimes.”

“So answer honestly now.”

“I’m thinking I’m a little old for a nooner.”

She slapped his arm, laughing. “Bastard!”

He leaned over, kissed her forehead, then climbed out of the bed. “If I can figure out how to open your fancy refrigerator, I’m going to get a beer. You want anything?”

“Right now,” she said, “I don’t feel as if I need anything.”

Pretty sure that was a compliment, Quinn made his way into Zoe’s state-of-the-art kitchen. The one she admitted she seldom cooked in. Quinn was sure she was telling the truth there. The gleaming white appliances looked brand new, especially the double-oven stove, which resembled the instrument panel of a jet airliner.

The built-in refrigerator door had so much weight and heft it felt like a well-balanced vault door when he opened it. There wasn’t much in the fridge in the way of food—a small bowl of apples, something shadowy in the cheese compartment, an unopened carton of orange juice, six bottles of white wine, and half a dozen bottles of Heineken beer. Like the refrigerator of a supermodel, Quinn thought, though he didn’t know one supermodel. He withdrew one of the green Heineken bottles and closed the refrigerator door. He used a bottle opener he’d noticed in one of the drawers rather than risk that the cap wasn’t a twist-off, and then carried the bottle into the bedroom.

Zoe didn’t appear to have moved. The warmth and scent of their afternoon sex was still in the air, not yet dissipated by the slowly rotating ceiling fan above the acre-sized bed.

Quinn touched the cold bottle to Zoe’s damp forehead, and she smiled. He sat on the edge of the mattress, facing half away from her.

Before she got a chance to ask him what he was thinking, he said, “Why do you have so many damned pillows?” He was staring at the stacks of throw pillows from the bed that towered on the carpet.

“They’re for show,” she said.

“Ah. I know about that.” He took another sip of cold beer. “I visited your doctor friend this morning.”

Tick, tick, tick,
went the fan.

Zoe was silent.

“He won’t bother you again,” Quinn said.

“He hadn’t bothered me lately,” Zoe said. “It was you he might have bothered.”

“Yeah, with his anger issues.”

“Do you think he was the one who broke into your office and assaulted you?”

“I still don’t know what to think.”

“So you talked to him mostly about me.”

“I had to, Zoe.”

“Because he might have attacked you, you were afraid for me.”

“Anger issues are anger issues,” Quinn said.

“Did you terrorize him?”

Quinn smiled. “I wouldn’t say that. Whatever Beeker’s faults, he doesn’t seem easy to terrorize.” He looked over at her. “You want a sip of beer?”

“No, thanks. Did you threaten him?”

“He threatened me. Us, actually. Said he had some very personal photographs of you and if we harassed him he’d post them on the Internet. He said you’d know where.”

“I believe he might,” Zoe said. “Those photos—”

“I don’t care about them, Zoe. He won’t post them.”

“You said he didn’t scare.”

“But he knows what will happen to him if he posts those kinds of photos of you, if he ever bothers you again. He didn’t have to be scared to understand.”

“How can you know that?”

“I was emphatic.”

He still didn’t look at her, but he heard the sheets rustle as she moved closer on the wide bed. He felt her kiss his bare side, play her tongue over him. It was only slightly warmer than his flesh.

Tick, tick, tick…

“What did he say when you brought up the subject of the office break-in?” she asked.

“I didn’t bring it up directly, but he doesn’t have an alibi for its time frame. Says he was home in bed alone.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I told him I didn’t believe anyone about everything.”

“Is that true?”

“It is except for you,” Quinn said, twisting his torso so he could look into her eyes. “You’re different.”

Pearl dropped the mail all over the floor but didn’t give a damn. She was too tired.

She closed and locked her door, then stepped over the clutter on the floor.

After another hot and unproductive day on the job, she’d finally found refuge in her apartment. She’d left the window-unit air conditioner on low so the place wouldn’t preheat like an oven, but it still felt almost as hot as outside. Sometimes when she left the unit on like that it would freeze up and put out only brief wafts of neutral air while spitting occasional flecks of ice.

Like this time.

She switched off the struggling unit and turned away from it in disgust.

The bedroom was even warmer than the living room. She turned on that window unit, then went into the kitchen and switched on its smaller and almost useless air conditioner. The apartment’s air conditioners looked about twenty years old. Where did the landlord buy this crap? If it kept up like this, she’d have to curl up in the refrigerator to find any relief from the heat.

She returned to the living room, slipped off her shoes and blouse, and slumped down on the sofa wearing only slacks and her bra, waiting for the bedroom and kitchen to cool down a few degrees. She’d have a snack and a cold beer, then go into the bedroom and stretch out wearing only her panties and try to read the latest
New Yorker.
For some reason she enjoyed reading about the Broadway plays she couldn’t afford to see.

When she’d lived with Quinn they’d often gone to the theater. He was a Broadway buff and had turned her into one before they’d split up, leaving her with a habit she couldn’t afford. He’d enjoyed Pinter and Stoppard, she
The Lion King.

Quinn.

Pearl wasn’t sure if it was the heat or lack of progress on the investigation that was keeping her in such a state of irritation, or if it was the knowledge of Quinn’s affair with the psychoanalyst Zoe.

It wasn’t that she had anything against Zoe Manders, but what the hell was Quinn doing sleeping with a shrink, anyway? If there was one thing their love lives should have taught both Quinn and Pearl it was that cops are best off mated with cops. They were the only ones who understood each other.

Shouldn’t that also be true of psychoanalysts?

What the hell do Quinn and Zoe talk about over breakfast? While riding in cabs? When watching the sun set? After they screw?

Me?

The thought of being the subject of Quinn and Zoe’s pillow talk brought a smoldering ember to flame in Pearl’s stomach. She stood up restlessly and retrieved from the floor the handful of mail she’d brought up from her box down in the lobby.

Pearl carried the mail into the kitchen, where by now it might be a few degrees cooler.

Only it wasn’t.

She went over and slapped the air conditioner, but it reacted pretty much the way Quinn did the few times she’d slapped him. It ignored her. She might as well have slapped a brick wall.

Screw it!

After getting a Budweiser from the refrigerator, she sat down at the small wooden table, took a couple of long pulls on the bottle, then turned her attention to the mail.

Jesus Christ!

Aside from the usual bills and ads, half of her mail—
half!
—was from doctors or medical clinics. Most of it wasn’t even the kind of mail that required opening. Fanned out on the table was one color flier or brochure after another warning of the dangers of ignoring seemingly harmless growths anywhere on the body, advising routine searches for such growths, explaining the horrors that might evolve from such tiny discolorations or moles.

Moles!

Her mother! Her mother and that goddamned Milton Kahn! They’d prompted these to be sent, and perhaps sent some themselves.

Pearl’s first impulse was to reach for the phone and call her mother, but she caught herself in time. That would only make things infinitely worse. And calling and dressing down Milt would do no good. In truth, he might not even know about her mother’s efforts to frighten Pearl back into his arms. Maybe it was just her mother and Milt’s aunt, Mrs. Kahn, out at the assisted living home in New Jersey, fighting boredom by becoming engrossed in matchmaking and medical terrorism.

Pearl took another long pull of beer and hoped the alcohol would soon calm her nerves. Pearl’s mother, Mrs. Kahn, and Milton Kahn. Most likely all three were in on the sporadic, creepy mailings that had finally erupted into this postal bombardment.
This…this…!

Take it easy. Don’t assume. Best to give this some calm thought.

It was probable that Milt at least knew about the assault by mail and condoned it. But if Pearl called him, he’d deny it. And wasn’t that what this was all about, getting her to call him?

She stood up from the table and threw the mail in with the kitchen trash. All of it. Including any bills that might have been hiding between brightly colored images of moles gone amok.

Then she finished her beer and went into the bathroom, where she stood before the mirror and took yet another long, long look at the mole behind her right ear, until the ear ached from being bent drastically forward to reveal the mole. She’d been examining the mole so frequently lately that her right ear appeared swollen and larger than her left.

Pearl splashed cold water over her face, patted it dry with a towel, then leaned on the washbasin with both hands and assessed herself anew in the mirror. The stress she’d been under since joining Quinn’s investigation showed, the stress from worrying about murder and the mole. She leaned closer to the mirror to get a better look at the somber woman staring back at her.

You look like you’ve been run over by a subway.

Damn my mother! Damn Mrs. Kahn! Damn Milton Kahn!

Damn Quinn! And Fedderman, too. And that bitch, Zoe.

Look what they’re doing to me!

“Enough of this bullshit,” Pearl said to the other Pearl.

The other Pearl nodded, gave her a grim smile.

She would make another appointment with another dermatologist who wasn’t Milton Kahn, and she would keep that appointment. She would have the seemingly harmless mole examined by an unbiased physician and put the matter to rest.

She was pretty sure she would.

Rhodes was too quick for him. Jerry Dunn had been following Thomas Rhodes for the last fifteen minutes, staying well back, waiting for Rhodes either to be relatively isolated, or surrounded by so many people that the bark of a shot would only serve to confuse them and the shooter—the hunter—could easily be lost among the milling humanity.

What Dunn liked was that Rhodes was carrying a black leather duffel bag slung from his shoulder by a thick strap. That meant he intended to run rather than try to turn the tables and become hunter rather than prey. Probably, Dunn thought, because Rhodes knew that if he couldn’t successfully go into hiding he’d continue to be hunted no matter how this particular joust with death turned out.

What Dunn didn’t like was that the duffel bag was only partly zipped, and Rhodes walked with one arm resting on the bag, his hand inside it. Dunn was sure the hand was curled around a .25-caliber revolver exactly like the one concealed in the fold of the morning
Times
he was carrying.

Rhodes was wearing brown slacks and a brownish tweed sport coat, warm for this kind of weather. Dunn figured that was so he could take all the useful clothing with him that wouldn’t fit into the bag. It also meant he might be heading for a cooler climate. Not once had Rhodes glanced behind him, but Dunn didn’t take for granted that his presence was unknown.

Suddenly Rhodes crossed Seventh Avenue in the middle of the block. At Fifty-first Street he jauntily descended the steps to a subway stop.

Dunn had to hurry. He followed down the concrete steps toward the platform, aware that his haste might cause carelessness. He might be entering a trap.

Ahead, beyond the turnstiles, he could see people coming up another flight of steps. Apparently a train had just arrived.

Dunn had a Metro card good for a week. He hurried through a turnstile, elbowing aside some of the crowd moving the opposite direction and pushing through the turnstiles to exit.

At the head of the steps he stopped.

He had a clear view down to a landing and a continuation of concrete steps, and saw no sign of Rhodes. Had he been tricked?

Damn it!

He glanced back toward the turnstiles and caught a glimpse of men’s brown pants, as someone who might have been Rhodes jogged up the steps beyond the turnstiles and ran toward the street.

Rhodes?

The color of the pants was perfect.

Dunn ran toward the turnstiles, pushed through to exit, and dashed up the steps, taking them three at a time.

Back in the sunshine at street level, he looked in all directions.

No Thomas Rhodes.

Calm down,
Dunn told himself.
Calm down!

He didn’t doubt Rhodes had known he was being tracked and had used the subway stop to slip away from his pursuer. He must have been waiting just to the side of the street steps so he could cut back the way he’d come after Dunn had hurried toward the turnstiles without a sideways glance. Now back up on the crowded sidewalks, Dunn had no chance of finding him again to resume tracking.

He moved back into a doorway and stood thinking, his eyes all the time moving, seeking another momentary glimpse of Rhodes.

Rhodes was wearing a heavy sport jacket and carrying a bag that could only be called luggage, so he was traveling. He might catch a cab and head for one of the airports, but his pursuer would figure him to travel by air, probably in first class.

Dunn knew he had to guess, and he went with the odds. What was the least likely way Rhodes would travel?

A bus.

Possibly a train, but less likely was a bus.

If that was the case, Dunn had a pretty good idea where Rhodes would hook up with his transportation. Where whoever was hunting him would have to make another choice. Port Authority Terminal on Forty-second Street, where a traveler could board either a bus or a subway train.

Rhodes wasn’t carrying the duffel bag for nothing.

Dunn got out in the street and hailed a cab. He told the driver he was pressed for time and there was a twenty in it for him if he drove fast for the Port Authority Terminal, that he needed to hook up with someone he did business with and it was critical to an important deal for him to get there before a bus left.

All true. In its fashion.

It had been almost a week since Hobbs had laid a hand on her. Temporarily at least, Lavern Neeson was unbruised.

Often he’d call her from work to keep tabs on her, so she’d faked a doctor’s appointment this time, knowing that since she was unmarked Hobbs wouldn’t be interested. And she’d told him she thought she was coming down with a summer cold, not only to keep him away from her, but to give her an excuse for her sham appointment.

Where she’d taken her unbruised self was to the lounge where she’d almost been picked up by the handsome guy with the hooded eyes and jet-black hair. It was about the same time of day she’d been there last time, so he might well be there, too. She could picture him sitting on the same stool as before, hunched over his drink, and then walking toward her, absently spinning bar stools as he came. Then the change in his expression as he saw the bruises on her face, bruises that makeup couldn’t quite conceal. She hadn’t been able to get the man out of her thoughts, out of her dreams.

It could be different this time.

As she entered the lounge she blinked a few times to help adjust her eyes to the dimness, looking all around for the dark-eyed man.

He wasn’t there.

Well, what did you expect? With your crappy luck.

But on the same stool where dark-eyes had sat was another man, in his late thirties, maybe forty. A nice-enough-looking guy wearing gray slacks and a shirt and tie. He was looking at Lavern and smiling. He had a lot of dark stubble on his chin, but that was the style, and maybe he was growing a beard.

When she got closer, she glanced at his left hand and didn’t see a wedding band. For all that was worth these days.

Still smiling, he nodded to her and said, “You’re late, but that’s okay. We can make up for lost time.”

Another bullshit artist.

“Do we know each other?”

“I’ve never before laid eyes on you,” he admitted. The smile widened. Nice teeth, very white. “See, we’re starting off honestly.”

Lavern smiled back.

Why not? She could use a little talk, a little personal, painless attention.